The other week, while hard at work on the Long Road trilogy of articles, I received an alert about a vulnerability in a plug-in and what to do about it.

Nothing unusual about that, it happens regularly. I gave the message a quick scan, and double-checked that the affected software wasn’t in use at Campaign Mastery, and normally, that would be the end of it.

Not for the first time, my thoughts brushed lightly over the way that the content management and hosting software of the core suite at the heart of the website changed so enormously depending on what extra functionality you enabled, and how what I need for Campaign Mastery could be so different to what someone else using the same core might need for their site.

Look and feel is the most superficial element – that comes from a particular type of plug-in called a theme – but it’s also the most noticeably to the casual observer. Then there are the plugins that provide some sort of front-end functionality that is visible to the visitor – the tag cloud and the print-friendly button that accompanies each post, for example. And, in back of those, there are plug-ins that provide back-end functionality – things that help in the management of the site but that the casual visitor would never see.

It’s a virtual certainty that the combination that I have here is going to be different to the combination of virtually every other website out there, even if it is built around the same core. There might be a hundred thousand that are almost exactly the same, but actually being a mirror-image? No – there are just too many options, too many plug-ins that purport to do the same job.

Anyway, as I said, this is normally just a passing reverie in response to the trigger stimulus, but this time, it fell on more fertile ground – exactly what the association was, I’m not entirely sure.

It occurred to me, on this occasion, that the structure of a WordPress website is a perfect analogy to an RPG campaign…

Core Structure

The key to this part of the analogy lies in the word “core”. The core structure of an RPG is the central rules package, often called the ‘core rules”, and this is so ubiquitous a factor that no matter how heavily you modify the rules with ‘plug-in packages’, the core rules are commonly used as a referent for the game. “I’m running D&D” or “It’s a Pathfinder game” or “It’s basically Gurps” or whatever.

From a rules engineering standpoint, you can consider plug-in rules packages as changing what part of the rules does, but the core rules still define how it does it, but that’s not entirely accurate; it assumes that your particular rules combination aims for maximum possible consistency from one part of the game to another. As any experienced player or GM knows, that’s sometimes not even the case within a set of core rules!

This is one area in which there have been vast improvements over the years, and expectation levels have risen accordingly, while tolerance for inconsistencies is correspondingly reduced. The resulting difference in mindset is one differentiating factor in “old-school gaming”; when someone describes themselves or their preferred campaign as “old school”, they are announcing that having particular parts of the rules package be ‘fit for purpose’ in the eyes of the GM is more important than having everything neat and consistent.

‘Theme’

The campaign background is the equivalent of the website theme. This is often more than just superficial look-and-feel stuff, though that can be dominant; there can be micromanaging of aspects of the functionality. One thing I’ve played with constantly on Campaign Mastery, for example, are the range of font sizes used for the tag cloud and the thresholds for display; we’ve been publishing here for so long that without regular tweaks, rarely-used tags would simply vanish into the ether.

Front-End

The equivalent of front end plug-ins are supplementary material that affects player choices and options. Third-party supplements, officially ‘optional’ rules, and deliberate rules exclusions – it used to be quite common to completely disregard part or all of the D&D rules regarding alignment for example. My impression is that the heat has largely gone out of that debate in recent years, but it once raged white-hot amongst players and GMs.

Anything that adds a PC race or class or feats that can be chosen as options or anything along those lines qualifies as a ‘front end’ change. Most of the time, these are simply ‘adding functionality’ but a few can actually turn off and replace elements of the core functionality with something more ‘refined’ or ‘customized’ or ‘tweakable’.

Back-End

Quite obviously, then, the equivalents of Back-end plug-ins are going to be ‘Supplementary Material that is used by the GM to create content’ – monster manuals and locations and cosmologies, and so on. This is more focused on the game world, which in turn provide the building blocks that are used to construct the campaign background.

There may be – heck, there are – those who don’t think that back-end changes don’t have that big an impact, but I beg to differ.

In a very real way, they are all about what resources the GM can call upon to impact the plotline that describes whatever the PCs are doing, but they are always a double-edged blade – whenever the GM comes up with a plotline or contemplates a situation (often not of his own making), these are all elements that can intersect with and potentially disrupt the straightforward scenario that would otherwise result.

Sometimes, readers have trouble seeing that point, dismissing it as relevant only if you are excessively micromanaging the campaign and delivering plot trains. So here’s a simple example:

The PCs, for whatever reason, have to take a certain magic item to a certain place at a certain time. The journey to that place, setting up the magic item when it gets there, and dealing with whatever doing this is supposed to accomplish, are the straightforward scenario.

In order to get it there, they have to cross over swampland that the GM has already designated as home to a society of Lizardfolk that can smell magic and worship it as a God. No problems so far, that’s just predefining some of the content of that straightforward scenario.

But the GM has also established that a certain Thief’s Guild from a certain game supplement are heavily embedded in the city from which the PCs are to set forth, with eyes in every corner and fingers in every pie in that part of the world. They won’t simply have gone away, and it strains credibility for that group not to be aware of this item and the impending transport arrangements. They are from a completely different game supplement / canned adventure to the one which describes the magic item quest, and therefore are an X factor that the source material doesn’t envisage.

That puts the onus on the GM to decide what the Thief’s Guild are going to do about the situation. They could be friend or foe; they could try to take advantage of the situation, for example by attempting to capture the item and hold it for ransom. They might simply covet the item for its monetary value, and attempt to steal it before the PCs even get their hands on it. They are a complication caused by the intersection of material from two different sources.

Throw in Faye, and Drow, and dark gods, and evil sorcerers, and anyone else with both the capacity to learn of the object and its mission and a potential vested interest or benefit in sticking their own oars into the simple machinery of the mission. In some cases, these might be established forces within the campaign; in others, the GM has them in place for some later plot ideas but they haven’t actually played any noted significant role in the campaign to date. What’s more, they carry the additional complication that the GM doesn’t want to compromise his ultimate intended purpose for the group.

Always, the GM has to ask – about any plot development or event – who has the capability of knowing about the situation and what capacity and motive do they have for intervening. The more complicated the campaign, with more back-end supplements plugged into the mix, the longer the list of campaign elements who might intervene.

Every GM and playing group has some sort of limit to their capacity to manage this sort of thing. Actual lists and reminders can be useful tools in expanding that limit. One of my strategic assets as a GM has always been the number of such ‘eggs’ that I can juggle in my head over a long period of time, and integrating them into a ‘big picture’ forest. The tapestry is always composed of many threads.

This places a natural limit to the back-end supplements that the GM can fully integrate into his world (sometimes, you can pick and choose).

As an aside, I often get asked what the big difference between a player and a GM is. A natural GM will generally have a higher threshold for translating small-picture content into a big-picture overview and vice-versa, in my experience; but all GMs ‘build up’ that ‘muscle’ by virtue of GMing over time, even if they started no more capable than the players they referee. The only people who should not GM if they can avoid it are (1) those who are unable to grow in this respect (there are some), and (2) those who find this so much of a struggle that they don’t enjoy the process. Everything else can be learned, or at least improved to the point of being tolerable, so anyone else can be a GM. Whether or not someone else is more qualified or more adept in that role is an entirely separate question.

In its own way, that’s a good thing, because it means that you can get a similar but distinct campaign simply by removing one such supplement and substituting another (staying well below your threshold, whatever it might be).

You can start a campaign with exactly the same characters (in terms of racial profile, stats, and personality) and by virtue of integrating them into a different environment with different challenges and opportunities, end up with two or more completely different campaigns simply by changing the ‘back end’.

Front-end changes may be more overt and obvious, but back-end changes can be the more significant – in the long term.

Putting it all together

Every campaign is just a little different. The only way to get two D&D campaigns that are exactly the same, to the point of complete interchangeability, or direct one-to-one comparison in any form, is to restrict the structure to core rules only. Everything that gets added to that list, no matter how canonical it might be, subtracts from that universality (unless the same material is added to both, and in the same way, of course).

The differences might not be obvious, they might not even be noticeable at all, but they are there, and domino effects will magnify any points of differentiation between two campaigns.

This can add up to generating a more significant differentiation between campaigns than having different GMs does. But, again, two different GMs working from the same ‘mix’ of supplementary plug-ins can result in markedly different campaigns conceptually and in terms of the player experience, simply through being different individuals with different abilities and skills and interests. Change the content, and you change the website, in other words (and getting back to the analogy) (nor are these completely independent variables, it should be added).

But the game system ‘plug-ins’ are every bit as significant a point of difference as having a different GM – that’s how important they are.

Extending the metaphor

I can push the metaphor just a little bit further. This whole train of thought was inspired by a security problem for a website plug-in; well, security isn’t a major issue in RPG content (outside of publishing considerations) but if you define such events as ‘processes that let individuals do things that they are not sanctioned to do’ (which is stretching the nuances of language just a little), then game balance / interface problems would seem to qualify, and those are both very real problems that are potentially just as devastating as having a hackable plug-in can be.

See, for example, The Woes Of Piety And Magic, which I described as part of the Biggest Mistakes RPG Blog Carnival, many years ago.

This is particularly apt in terms of the overall analogy; you never like to have obsolete or out-of-date plug-ins as part of your site structure simply because those are more likely to be unpatched and vulnerable to malicious intent. In fact, every site plug-in should have a definite purpose and be regularly reviewed to ensure that it is fit for purpose. And, should one not be, if the purpose is still important, the hunt then begins for a replacement.

Similarly, no RPG campaign should carry game supplements that do not contribute something specific to the campaign that the GM finds desirable. Doing so simply opens the door to any systemic flaws they contain without commensurate value to the campaign. Nor can any campaign afford to carry, unpatched, any supplement with identified flaws of the type described above; that’s simply asking for trouble.

In fact, as soon as a problem of the game balance / game interface type is detected, the GM has to pose some hard questions: can a rules ‘patch’ be used to overcome the problem (however unofficial)? Is the content / utility of the supplement valuable enough to warrant the effort required? Or would it be better to simply ‘uninstall’ the content from the campaign?

Furthermore, Campaigns always represent an evolving internal landscape; it might be that a particular supplement loses its relevance, in whole or in part, as the campaign advances. This is the equivalent of that material not being maintained – any liabilities contained within still linger, but the value that they once afforded the campaign has a limited shelf life. “Uninstalling’ such can free the campaign up for the incorporation of newer and more relevant material, or simply reducing the GM’s workload.

Working The Analogy

Any analogy or metaphor can be a useful tool, a point that I’ve made before; they offer a new perspective even on situations that are well-known, illuminating otherwise obscure points, and even suggesting courses of action or policies to be implemented.

This metaphor may be limited in that respect, but it still suggests that GMs should vet and restrict the supplementary material that they permit, if necessary making hard choices between two different supplements of equal value to the campaign. Fortunately, unlike website architecture, GMs can pick and choose and make selective incorporation – I don’t have to load my campaign down with the whole of, say, Libris Mortis; I can pick and choose.

A concluding alternative analogy

There is another analogy that is worth taking a moment to contemplate: The core rules of a campaign are not unlike the diet of an individual, while the game supplements that they incorporate are like prescription pharmaceuticals. They each have a defined purpose, and if they fail to achieve that purpose, it’s time to stop taking them; but, more importantly, each has the potential to interact with other medications in unexpected ways. No two patients and their regimens are exactly alike, and what works for someone else might not benefit you. My father, brother, and many of my friends all suffer from type-2 diabetes; but we are all on different medications and dietary restrictions.

Unwanted interactions between game supplements are always a potential concern. The benefits always need to outweigh the liabilities if the campaign is to be maintained in optimal health.

Some ideas are ubiquitous, and appear in many different game supplements in minor variations and under different names; these should always be mutually-exclusive and never permitted to stack. Game systems have a certain level of resilience, a certain capacity for enhancement which, if exceeded, pushes the internal mechanics to or beyond a breaking point.

My favorite example of this kind of thing is the original form of “Luck” in the Hero System. This states that for every level of “Luck” that a character has, he rolls 1d6 at the start of each day’s play, and the total number of sixes rolled defines how intensely his luck can be used to modify events within the game to the players liking. All good.

Until someone asks to buy or utilize more “Luck” than the 3d6 maximum imagined by the system. Two players with Luck each trying to create circumstances favorable to the same outcome or end, for example – do the results stack (what happens if you get more than three sixes?), or is it the initial number of dice to be tested that stack? On the face of it, the latter is the simpler choice – but when you dig into the probabilities involved, above 13d6, it becomes more probable that you will have three sixes than that you won’t. And the game mechanics fracture and break down. At the same time, though, it seems unreasonable to prevent any stacking of this particular game mechanism, because such restrictions don’t apply to anything else.

The only solution: completely ‘uninstall’ this version of luck and replace it with something else. Which is a shame, because the existing power was convenient for simulating all sorts of other phenomena in a quick and painless way.

D&D 3.x is particularly prone to this sort of thing – I have seen a first-level character constructed with +13 to his stealth roll by taking advantage of a confluence of game mechanics from different supplements. And they always put the GM into am impossible, game-breaking, situation: Either he permits the PC to almost always succeed on stealth checks, virtually with impunity, or he makes it virtually impossible for any of the other PCs to use stealth at all by hitting the party with challenges geared to the abilities of the one character.

Neither does a campaign any favors.

The lessons contained in this section are things that I have seen and experienced first-hand, though not to the full extent described. More to the point, they are situations that caught me unawares until it was too late. It just so happens that the metaphors offered in this article would have forewarned me to look for such problems instead of being blindsided by them. And that’s the ultimate value of a metaphor – its utility as a teaching tool. So take the lessons and perspectives from these ones and be that little bit better-prepared to understand and administrate your campaigns.

Blog construction through a popular platform like WordPress is all about the plugins. I turns out that, in a way, the same can be said of RPG campaigns. Who’da thunk it?

This is the third, longest (53,566 words!), and final part of my review / demonstration of the “Tangled Web” campaign sub-structure. I’m going to presume that you’ve already read part two, which you can find at this link and dive straight in right where I left off. And, if you haven’t gotten in on the ground floor of everything that’s going on here, you should start with part one.

Don’t worry, we won’t go anywhere while you get all caught up!

So, a quick snapshot of where we’re up to.

Part one of the series dealt with the beginnings of the adventure (and this is all one big adventure), showing where the PCs were at in their lives and the things that were occupying their attention, then enmeshing them in the politics and international intrigue of the home-dimension of their parent organization. It also contained the transitions from Phase 1 of the Adventure (PCs at home) to Phase 2 (Spy Games) and from Phase 2 to Phase 3 (Central American Travels).

I sometimes get asked how to narrow the focus of a campaign that has grown Cosmic in scope to something more local, or, more commonly, how I transit from a cosmic / high-concept adventure to a smaller, more gritty, more local adventure within a campaign – this provides an excellent example of doing both.

Part two dealt with the majority of those Mexican Travels and the use of passage from A to B as a vehicle for delivering a series of isolated mini-adventures. It’s an excellent example of isolated, stand-alone adventures combining to create a campaign, and of pacing within such a campaign; each adventure had very little relation to the one before it, but the fact of the prior adventures provided context for each adventure that followed. I interrupted it just as the last of those was escalating to an epic finish to this mini-series for a number of reasons – not least because of the length that the previous post had attained.

Conceptually, that big finish was going to be more directly related to the next phase of the sub-campaign, so it made a certain amount of sense in that respect to draw the line at this point.

So, to recap the current situation: Using magic as a Technology on an industrial scale; Experimental parts to be used in a grand experiment that held huge promise if successful but huge danger if not executed perfectly, big reality-altering explosion that could (potentially) wipe out all life on earth, which the PCs narrowly survive….

Synopsis, Session 14 (from Session 15) – continued

The PCs had just engaged in various rescue operations in the town that had grown up around the experimental facility and assessed the scope of the situation before regrouping. Their ‘diplomatic escort’ and guide, Maynor Morales, came up with a desperate plan, having decided that the optimum outcome was for the researcher, Dr Esperanza, to survive and learn from the experience. Convincing the PCs of this, he began expounding a plan that was complicated by the need to avoid creating paradoxes.

“We have to travel back in time, using this magic circle to protect us from the chaotic effects outside, until a moment after the out-there versions of us lose sight of the Clippership, having returned to deal with the catastrophe. We can then rejoin it and complete our journey to Neuvo Laredo, having lost just eight or nine minutes.

“Using the circle as a vehicle gives us an opportunity to rescue Dr Esperanza en route. Zeitgeist, I was greatly impressed by your ability to see through solid rock at a great distance.”

This was something that she had been doing to lead rescue crews to trapped people in the town.

“I want you to search the ruins of the Laboratory until you find her body, and then concentrate on the heart.

“If we were simply to travel back in time by most methods, we would perceive only the Astral Plane around us. By traveling within the timeline when I reverse our Temporal Vector, the illusion can display the world around us. At some point, then, Zeitgeist, you will see Dr Esperanza’s apparent death.

“The first instant that she is definitively alive, but still trapped, we will exchange her body within the rock with a facsimile. Specter, Zantar, you have shown an uncanny facility to combine the normally incompatible; I need you to put your heads together and come up with that facsimile and find a way of ensuring that even an experienced mage such as myself cannot distinguish between the duplicate and the original.”

A fresh challenge, made more difficult by the demands placed on it. But that, in a nutshell, is how the PCs rescued Dr Esperanza without erasing her knowledge of the disaster, prevented the global catastrophe, satisfied the Oracle’s Prophecy, and got themselves back on track in terms of their own mission. Ultimately, overcoming the difficulties and problems required all of them to coordinate a precisely-timed operation. They essentially had to amputate her artificial legs and leave them behind to create the impression that she had died, then return her to a point where she would be found, just barely alive.

This was not a solution that could ethically be applied to most people, but could be applied to her because her legs were mechanical in nature, and this had been emphasized during the group’s initial encounter with her.

Problem solved, the PCs returned to their own mission, heading for Nuevo Laredo and their planned entry into the USNA (which comprised the old USA and Canada into a single nation).

Additional Notes

Everything above was originally intended to be presented as the conclusion of Part 2. It was a dynamic action-heavy conclusion to the PCs Central American sojourn, involving confrontations with Architecture-turned-golems and other such. Ultimately, it was the rescue of Dr Esperanza that was the climax of the climax, and involved the most significant developments at a campaign level.

In particular, the refinement of time travel techniques, which I’ve called out above, warrants further discussion.

In this campaign, the “astral plane” is defined as the ‘medium through which time flows,’ a higher plane of existence if you will. This plane can be accessed in various ways, as mystics have been doing for centuries, leaving their mortal bodies behind and projecting their minds into the realm from which all of space and time are accessible (at least in theory). It follows that parallel worlds can be reached across the Astral Plane, and from a temporal perspective, are as branches off the primary time-line – which achieves that significance purely as the home space-time of the dimensional traveler.

Most time travel is a simple out-and-in, as shown:

Time protects itself from paradoxes by spinning off a new alternate world whenever a time traveler does something to impact the timeline – like arrive – one in which they did not. There is a threshold of change required before such changes actually manifest in a new timeline, but in general, a time traveler can monkey around to his heart’s content without changing his personal history or circumstances one iota.

This situation rapidly becomes more complicated when you think about it for a while. For example, Time travelers from timeline A implies another bunch of parallel time travelers from parallel timeline A1, both heading for the same point on their common timelines.

This is explained with the theoretical statement that each timeline actually consists of an infinite or near-infinite number of parallel timelines that have minute differences that did not exceed the threshold – one atom of uranium decayed in timeline A0 and a different one in A, for example. To all intents and purposes, the two are identical. As soon as a time-traveler touches down in A, he finds himself in A0 without realizing it, and his presence immediately raises the energy of change above the threshold, so this timeline is not actually there for time-travelers from A1 to reach when they arrive.

This doesn’t work if all the arrivals are at the same instant in time – but there is error in the transit mechanism that is more than enough to ensure that this doesn’t happen. In fact, the more significant a point in time is (and the more interesting it is to time travelers as a result), the greater the margin of error generated.

This was the only form of time travel that the PCs knew of. What Maynor showed them how to do was something previously considered impossible (because the approach they were using didn’t permit it) – time travel within the traveler’s own native timeline.

There were several steps involved:

1. Isolate the travelers personal timelines from those of the broader space-time around them in a bubble of temporal force;
2. Use an illusion on the outside of the bubble to effectively make the bubble and its contents invisible to those on the outside;
3. Use a second illusion to show those on the inside an image of what was going on outside the bubble (necessary as no photons not already within it would be able to penetrate the bubble);
4. Do whatever you wanted with the personal timelines of everyone within the bubble.

Unlike the normal method, this permits surgical precision based on the position of the sun and other dynamic phenomena. But the difficulty means that even ‘experts’ in time travel and mages of the caliber of the PCs would find it difficult.

So, with that all foundation and context understood, I can move on.

Excerpt from Game Session 16

Last time, the great Mana Explosion was detailed and how the PCs put (most) of the jam back into the jam-jar afterwards. But there was an important coda to the disaster, one that kicks off the transition to the next phase of this epic adventure.

When you are underway again, Maynor approaches Specter and – choosing his words carefully – says, “I don’t have any logical basis for this assertion, but I got the distinct feeling when I was talking about the Time Travel rescue of Dr Esperanza that this not only wasn’t the first such expedition into other frames of reference that you’ve been on – and that you plan another one, soon.”

Specter gave a noncommittal non-denial.

“I haven’t that much personal experience in the field, myself – just enough to know that everyone’s first impression is that it’s just another inter-dimensional jaunt, and that this impression is completely 100% wrong. But I still remember most of what I was taught at the academy about it, if a little vaguely in patches, so if you think it might be helpful…”

Naturally, Specter was not slow in accepting. What’s more, because the other team members might also have need of the information, he quickly brought them into the discussion.

It should be noted that this was a multimedia presentation with full-screen diagrams. These won’t fit the landscape available at Campaign Mastery so I have reduced them to the maximum width permitted and hope that they will still be clear enough.

The Time-travel lecture that followed started with concepts familiar to the PCs and quickly moved beyond those concepts, but the whole lecture is presented below because readers might not be familiar with the material. See also my previous series on Time Travel In RPGs:

It’s also worth remembering that these illustrations are supposedly snapshots of a dynamically-evolving display being constructed by hand, on the fly, by the NPC giving the lecture. As such, they contain the occasional error that has been emplaced deliberately.

“Time isn’t a straight line. It’s a tangle of vibrations back and forth, twisting at critical moments and events – the more momentous the event, the greater the angle of change. It’s normal to depict timelines as two-dimensional representations even though they actually twist through three temporal dimensions (and contain three spacial dimensions) represented as one – a line.

“But this is an oversimplification. In reality, each critical event has a wide spectrum of possible outcomes. Usually, no matter how significant it might feel locally, and might eventually become, these timelines are almost indistinguishable from each other. It takes time for a domino effect to grow into something significant. And many of these outcomes are functionally the same – it generally doesn’t make much difference if you linger for an extra tenth of a second over your morning coffee, for example. Or for a tenth-and-a-half. But technically, both of those expressions of free will results in a new timeline. Before you know it, your timeline looks like this:

“And, of course, this phenomenon repeats itself at every critical event, defined as an event with more than one outcome. Such events occur every nanosecond in almost every particle in existence throughout the universe at the most minute level. But they also occur at the macro-scale – as I indicated, a fraction of a second longer lingering over a cup of coffee that does not amount to anything more significant, for example When discussing time travel, we normally ignore such events. And we simplify our maps of time by discarding low-probability outcomes. If I discard everything with a less than 60% chance, I get this:

“Now, each timeline represents a cluster of multiple similar timelines, and they are no longer so neatly defined. They have grown ‘fuzzy’. Some simplify further, abstracting their representation of time:

“It’s very important to remember what you are ignoring when you do this; it can catch you out, otherwise. Here’s a truer picture of the probability, with still more coalescing into three central strands. If you look very closely, you will find that they aren’t quite identical.

“Nevertheless, it’s often useful to start with the abstract representation and then work up to a more accurate reflection. Here, I’ve drawn a series of arcs at equal lengths from the critical event that caused the timeline to trifurcate. And, at point t, we have a time traveler.

“He can go into the past of the timeline that he is in, but that inevitably creates a new critical point – one branch containing the traveler’s arrival, and one that doesn’t. Incidentally, that was something that our recent rescue avoided – the potential for a divergent timeline did not exist until the force-field bubble was dropped, but by having a very specific and detailed plan and following it to the letter (as much as we could), we minimized the potential for divergence and maximized the probability that all timelines would carry the changes that we made. Eliminating choice and chance eliminates bifurcation and creates inevitability. Anyway…

“When this time traveler. reaches point t again, there will be a version of himself that returns into the past – and studies have found that the instant of the previous versions’ arrival have created a callus over that moment of arrival in those timelines in which he arrived from the future which resists with the full force of the timeline’s integrity, the arrival of a second version of the same time traveler. into the same timeline.

“Instead, the time traveler. finds himself entering the branch in which the first time traveler. didn’t arrive in the timeline, the ‘ignored’ branch – again bifurcating that timeline into one in which he arrived from the future and one in which he didn’t.

“The more inevitable it is that the time traveler. will return to the past, the greater the percentage of available timelines in which a time-traveler arrives in the past.

“The number of timelines is always one plus the number of time-travelers, at a minimum.

“Of course, reality is more complex; you can arrive at any point within the spacial dimensions contained within the timeline, so it’s theoretically possible for multiple versions of the same traveler. to arrive at different points within the same timeline at the same time. In practice, though, there’s that callus – and so we get a sorting mechanism in which the versions don’t intersect, except possibly in the Astral Plane.

“One way of avoiding the bifurcation of a timeline and the creation of a critical point is by the time-traveler deliberately targeting a variant timeline; if it’s virtually inevitable that the time traveler. will do so (and that doesn’t happen by accident), AND the time-traveler doesn’t make any sweeping changes in the other timeline, his arrival – in theory – doesn’t create a critical event. You can reliably observe but change nothing, or change something and introduce unreliability to your observations.

“Experimentation has shown that the more the target timeline differs from the one experienced by the time traveler., the weaker the resulting callus. I’ll leave the significance of that for you to ponder some other time. Instead, let’s focus on another aspect of time travel of more immediate practical value.

“It doesn’t matter how similar or how different they are, since we know that a time traveler. ALWAYS arrives in a timeline in which he had not previously arrived, it is ALWAYS just a tiny bit divergent from the one he knows. Maybe a die rolled a six instead of a five in a casino somewhere, or one radioactive atom decayed instead of another one – good luck finding a variation that small, somewhere in the entire universe! – but it will be at least a little bit divergent. And that means that the right way to represent it is with a bifurcated or trifurcated timeline.

“The time traveler. has three options: he can arrive in the past of a timeline, as shown by t-to-1; the can arrive concurrently to his present, as shown by t-to-2; or he can arrive at a future point, as shown by t-3 and t-4.

“The difficulty and accuracy of the trip is proportional to the angle between the temporal vector of the traveler. at the instant just prior to departure and a line connecting that point to the concurrent instant of arrival.

“So t-to-1 presents the greatest difficulty in accuracy, followed by t-2, then t-3, and then t-4. And that reveals a second fact: in futureward travel, the less divergent the timeline targeted from your own, the more easily you can be accurate; and the more divergent, the more difficult to be accurate. When traveling into the past, or a point concurrent to the past, this is reversed – the more divergent, the easier it is to be accurate, the less divergent, the harder.

“It’s as though there were a finite amount of uncertainty to go around. If you use some of it up by predicting the future you want to try to go to, there is that much less of it to throw you off course; but if you try for a very precise past, your arrival point will have to soak up a great deal more of that uncertainty, so your arrival time and location within that past will be greatly inaccurate.

“But that’s assuming a straight line between departure point and destination, and any inter-dimensional traveler. knows that just doesn’t happen. There are all sorts of astral-plane phenomena and dangers that throw or force a traveler. off that straight line; in reality, a traveler’s course looks more like this:

“And that introduces a new variable: the angle of entry into the target timeline, something that’s not always entirely under the control of the traveler. Once again, there’s fixed total uncertainty. So if you control both the departure and the target specificity, the only variable left to soak up the uncertainty is relative vector of travel on entry.

“That vector can differ in two respects – which, on vector analysis boil down to the same thing: angle of entry or relative rate of time compared to that of the timeline.
Since it’s only the vector component that aligns with the instantaneous vector of the timeline that matters, the more acute the angle of entry, the faster you will ‘appear’ within the timeline, but the less of your personal time-travel vector will be available to ‘match vectors’ with the timeline.

“The greater the differential between the two, the more stress the differential places on the physical and mental reality of the traveler. Entering at too sharp an angle can kill you.

“A lot of those intricate maneuvers are therefore an intentional attempt to approach the target point from a suitable angle that will minimize stress.

“But there’s one more factor: individuals continue to experience the passage of personal time during transit. The greater the distance covered, the greater the opportunity for encountering… something.

“There are thus competing priorities in any temporal transit, and the artistry of time travel is finding the ideal compromise between the two while avoiding temporal hazards.

There are two kinds of critical event. The first type is one that’s inevitable, given the history of the base timeline – one of those is created when a player is dealt a hand of cards, or draws a lottery number from a barrel. These are ‘tethered’ to the originating event – the one that makes the critical event inevitable. These tethers ensure that at an appropriate duration after the originating event, there will be a consequential critical event across multiple timelines – it’s as though the event creates a shock-wave that intercepts all the branching timelines at the same instant, give-or-take a little uncertainty.

“Since it’s really hard to have no effect on a timeline when you aren’t there one instant, and are the next, a time traveler’s arrival always generates a shock-wave of this type, though the degree of impact can vary so substantially that the shock-wave is often described as extremely fuzzy.

“The other kind of critical event is one that isn’t inevitable, but that arises out of the behavior of people. The power of free will, and all that. Whenever someone sentient makes a decision, that creates a critical event.

“Although it’s usual to assume that decision is synonymous with action, that isn’t the case. Nor is it at all likely that the instant of decision will be exactly the same across multiple timelines – it’s far more likely that it isn’t. So these are like an unexploded bomb connected to a random number generator.

“This is important to a time traveler. because the first type of event generates additional temporal stress – experiencing the same inevitable critical point on multiple timelines is wearing and fatiguing – while the second type of event generates additional uncertainty.

“It’s sometimes convenient to map all these factors onto something that takes a more statistical approach than the depiction of multiple timelines. This is called a Probability Map. A typical one, with a bifurcation caused by a critical event, looks like this:

“Notice that the presence of the alternate timeline impacts the distribution of probabilities over the map – the zones just outside the high probability regions have a greater probability of containing a timeline matching the specific parameters on the side closest to the other timeline, representing the graduated presence of timelines that are neither extreme completely, but are somewhere in between (quite literally, in most cases).

“By assessing where your departure timeline is and where your target timeline is within the map, you can estimate the relative significance of the various factors which cause stress and uncertainty. Or so I’m told; I never fully got my head around this part of the theory.

“Anyway, moving on: the instant of departure is critical, because of the way a real timeline is always twisting this way and that. Let’s say that you are aiming to correct or influence a critical event. Since it doesn’t matter how similar the target timeline is to your own, it will be divergent to some degree, it’s easiest to analyze by using two parallel timelines, like this:

“This shows seven different departure points, some before and some after the critical point in question. You can target a critical point before the event occurs if you can predict its’ existence and it’s of the first type and not the free will type – though there’s a little of the inevitable about a free-will event and vice-versa. What I’ve described are the theoretical absolutes, bear that in mind.

“The remote past is bad for both stress and accuracy. A little later and almost the same initial temporal vector is merely poor, because the separation between the timelines is less – so there’s less room for things to go wrong. As soon as the critical event becomes probable, you are likely to get the best possible combination.

“Waiting just a short span of further time until it becomes inevitable is usually the same as a concurrent equivalence – it’s okay, because of the shortness of the gap, but the temporal vector stops being in your favor. Waiting until you know the outcome of the event deteriorates the situation back to something as bad as the remote past.

“But there can still be minor confluences, where the trend is similar to that of the target timeline – which means that it is usually better to jump from frying pan to fire than to jump from safe ground into either. Waiting until another critical event has produced significant variation is the worst choice of all.

“Always assess your target point and timeline, and try to plan your time travel accordingly. Sometimes you can’t choose the point of departure, but can choose the point of arrival; sometimes it’s the other way around; and sometimes, it just sucks to be you.

“The final diagram I can show you describes a portion of the same but incorporating the consequences of having participated in the critical event that you are trying to change on one timeline already, in a ready-reckoner manner. This isn’t strictly correct, but as a tool for estimating the consequences, it’s excellent.

“But the resulting diagram is so complicated that I’ve taken each of the paths and replicated them separately at the bottom of the diagram. In essence, the more of the timeline’s events that you have experienced, and the more of the consequences that you have observed, the longer your effective travel in terms of stress and uncertainty.

“This is simulated by going ahead to the point beyond the target by the amount of certainty, then to a point behind the target by the amount of certainty, and then to the target point.

“Starting when the critical event is only possible, and not certain, produces a long path – but not a lot of messing about when you get there. This is shown by the blue traveler’s journey, labeled 1.

“Starting when the critical event is inevitable, but not yet resolved, produces a shorter direct path, but longer time trying to vector in on the target point. Overall, this yields more stress or more uncertainty or more of both – and the natural tendency is to minimize uncertainty because the temporal vectors are a closer match, as explained earlier. This is shown by the green line labeled 2.

“Starting when the critical event has taken place but the consequences are still being observed is worse still. Now almost everything is going against you. This is shown by the yellow line labeled 3. Note that there is not a lot of difference between this and a transit beginning AT the critical moment.

“Finally, if you wait until the consequences have second-generation consequences, you get the red path labeled 4. The universe doesn’t really want you messing about with its settled history; events have their own momentum within the temporal vector, and it takes a lot of effort to undo something.

“That’s why we couldn’t just find the Peregrin and take the whole ship back in time, or travel back to a point when we were already on board. The level of uncertainty would be low, so the Temporal Stress would have been off the charts – and it wasn’t certain whether or not we would be able to heal while the light-show was going on outside. Instead, we had to wait until the old ‘us’ were no longer in a position to notice it – then, just after we disembarked, we could board and it could leave. We’re still experiencing some Temporal Stress, because we’re in two places at the same time – so we’re getting pounded by shockwaves from inevitable critical events elsewhere.

In a previous adventure, the PCs had discovered that existing in two different space-times at the same time caused increased rates of exhaustion, reduced capacity for concentration and intellectual activities, slowed decision-making, mental fog, and even low levels of physical trauma, but they had not investigated or understood the mechanism behind that effect; they simply accepted that trying to ‘cheat’ the universe by being in two places at the same time was inherently stressful and tiring.

They had also learned that if they aimed to return to a point concurrent to the duration they would have experienced in their first timeline if they had not gone dimension-hopping, there was little or no such stress. They termed this ‘Temporal Shock’.

This diagram sums up with the first two figures, what they knew then, and with the third and fourth figures, what they now added to that knowledge.

The first figure represents a student trying to steal some extra study time before a big exam. As a general rule, the performance loss will be slightly greater than the benefits of the extra time – the extra coming from being present (even if not involved) during critical event e. Note that the student leaves during critical event f, or the performance deficit would have been even worse.

This applies to all relevant numeric values – so if the student were to study enough to get an extra 20% on his exam results, he would lose about 24% of his intellectual and physical capabilities and experience 24% greater fatigue.

The best approach to dimensional travel is shown by the second figure. Despite experiencing critical event d, the traveler. returns to his native timeline at a point at which his subjective time is equal to or less than the interval between departure and return so far as anyone remaining on the timeline is concerned. There would still be some Temporal Shock induced by the critical events affecting the timeline in his absence but these would be momentary and manifest only on his return to the timeline, just as there would be a singular instance of Temporal Shock upon entry to the parallel world on which critical event d takes place.

The third figure shows the traveler actively attempting to change the outcome of history after they had experienced two critical events. From the moment they arrive, they are subject to Temporal Shock from critical events a, b, AND c, which are ongoing throughout their temporal excursion AND for an equal interval of time when they return to their own time-frame because they returned to a moment just after they left. Note that while their own experienced history has not been changed by their actions, some parallel-world equivalent of them may have instituted a similar change in their native timeline, so effectively they return to a world in which history has been changed more-or-less the way they changed it.

The fourth figure shows the worst possible choices. The time travelers return to a point in time prior to their departure, and even if they don’t interfere in events, they are subjected to temporal shock not only from the critical events marked at a, b, and c, but also all the critical events that they are experiencing for a second time. This can double or triple the base level of Temporal Shock leaving the character significantly impaired for long after their temporal jaunt is complete.

The greater the impact on other people’s decisions, the greater the Temporal Shock experienced. Watching without interfering is much safer.

All this was also directly relevant to the PCs future plans and their primary assignment. If the nukes they were after had already been detonated before they began their time-travel, it would be a lot harder for them to succeed, and more of their capacities would be inaccessible. It also meant that they would have a greater likelihood of success, and experience less temporal trauma if they had clear plans in place.

It also meant that the tiredness everyone was now feeling wasn’t purely the result of the expenditure of effort in first the rescue of the townspeople, the restoration of the planetary Mana field using a self-perpetuating spell crafted with Rheezok assistance, and the rescue of Dr Esperanza – some, perhaps most, of it was the result of existing twice at the same time, made worse by it occurring within the one timeline.

“I realize that there’s a lot to unpack – this isn’t the same kind of practical instruction that I gave you earlier, this is altogether a more complicated subject. But the guidelines and principles should help you plan when and where you need to go.

Some practical advice:

• “Being multiple places at the same time, even on different timelines – bad. The more similar the timelines, the worse it is – so being on the same timeline twice is as bad as it gets.
• “Multiple jumps are much worse for temporal shock than one big trip – but much more accurate. You can minimize one source of stress only to maximize another if you’re not careful.
• “It’s always safer to go back to a time when nothing was happening than to a time when fates were in the lap of the gods – unless departure is from a time that is not equally sublime. If your departure point is a time of high tension, transit to another time of high tension and wait it out – you’ll encounter greater risks from events, but less inevitable harm from Temporal shock.
• “Try to always give yourself ample time to do everything and more besides. It’s astonishing how quickly it can be eaten up. And everything takes longer than you think when you’re fighting Temporal Shock.
• “Once you’ve experienced an event, live with it if you possibly can. Attempting to change it will probably be fatal – and probably unsuccessful. The fates will seem to be conspiring against you, every random chance biased against you, almost as though the universe was conspiring against you.

This practical advice clearly derived from the information presented in the lecture, and had a deep impact on the team’s future plans. They had been planning to jump back in time a week or so, at which point they would have barely enough time to get everything done to a superficial standard, and at which point the problem with the nukes might already be an inevitable crisis. This plan was completely incompatible with the advice Maynor had given

While no decisions were made in this respect at this point in time, they were all thinking about it and revising plans. And that was the point of delivering this info-dump at this point in the game; this was information that the PCs had to have to make rational decisions, delivered by someone whose bonafides had been established to their satisfaction. The information would have been utterly irrelevant earlier in the adventure; they already knew the part that was critical to what they were doing then (the basics of Temporal Shock).

The need to deliver this information was a key point in planning the mini-adventure to which this lecture was post-script. In some ways, you could say that the entire purpose of this particular set of events was to justify the delivery of the lecture, which required the prior experience of time travel as the solution to the crisis presented by the mini-adventure. That required an emergency dire enough to justify time travel as a solution; working backwards from that gave me the basics of the adventure. The combination of the events with a society in which they would logically transpire raised the question of what the authorities would know, given that the society would have access to sources of information beyond the normal – and that led to the creation of the Oracle. Each piece of the puzzle was built upon what was to follow.

Game Session 15 (cont)

The party then reached Nuevo Laredo I provided a potted impression of the place which may or may not bear any resemblance to the true-life relationship between the American city of Laredo and the Mexican town named. This was extremely abbreviated because events always seem to compress as a trip is coming to an end – while any lack of events seems to get drawn out.

Before they knew it, they were in possession of a ‘more appropriate’ vehicle provided by the Coahuila Government – a brand-new Chevy Gladiator(1), the same as a thousand others that would cross the border daily, for trade between the two was brisk – in fact, it was the only real reason for the existence of Nuevo Laredo.

(1) The basic Chevy van in a dozen configurations (some of them even officially recognized by the manufacturer) were marketed under this name in Mexico at this point in time. In the in-game reality, most of these were sold without engines fitted because the technology preferred in Coahuila was so different to the internal combustion employed north of the border. This particular model had both an internal combustion engine for use in the USNA and an ‘exotic’ steam engine (a two fire-sprite model) and was equipped with seating for 9 passengers, a small cargo space (in the mode of the people-movers (European designation) and mini-vans (US designation) that were becoming popular at the time (mid-80s), and diplomatic plates.

Maynor keeps the “Diplomatic Vehicle”. He intends to return to LA, gather some experts, and return with them to Coahuila to assist in recovery efforts after the disaster that befell them a few minutes ago – and instruct a certain engineer on some of the theory and practice of spellcasting while she is recuperating. If he times it right, he will arrive shortly after they departed back in time. He will also send a few students (who he thinks could benefit) down to spend some time with the Rheezok, but he will return to Los Angeles.

His final advice is to remember that if they contact him back whenever, he won’t know who they are, and the results could be catastrophic. Nevertheless, satisfied that they will use the information wisely, he provides contact information. Ideally, you should wait until there’s only one of you in this timeline before time-jumping again – but the urgency of your mission may not permit that, so remember when you get back to this point in time that you are already here twice and will experience Compounded Temporal Shock.

He suggests hiring a vehicle and recuperating in a local hotel if you can afford the time. If not, good luck!

With a jaunty wave, he then piloted the vehicle into the traffic and departed for Los Angeles, leaving the PCs on foot in a strange city in the US with only their forged documentation and some spending cash (intended to last them for three days) for company.

The PCs immediately revised the advice they had been given to incorporate things they knew but hadn’t been able to state. Travel back in time immediately, then rest in a local hotel and hire/purchase a couple of local vehicles is a more sensible plan. The further in time they could get from the imminent possible detonation of a nuclear device (a critical event if ever there was one) and/or a confrontation with whoever has it, the better they would be when those events did take place. And crossing the border with diplomatic plates won’t mean squat to anyone days or weeks before you do it, so this would provide additional protection against possible scrutiny by US Intelligence.

More Key Points & Notes

Maynor had been the one constant throughout Phase Three of the adventure, and his departure was symbolic of the end of that phase. This signaled a major change in the tonal quality of the mini-campaign – until this point, events had been driving the PCs forward, dictating what they encountered and what their imperatives were; as the architect of the locations and individuals through which they traveled, the societies and the manner of transport that they were able to provide, the mini-adventures and content of Phase Three in general had been provided by me as GM. Suddenly, the players were in total command; unless speaking as one of the NPC members, my sole contributions to the discussions were of the nature “that’s up to you”.

As the discussion continued, a consensus began to emerge, a broad plan of action, but (rather than binding them to it at this point), I had the players hold off on any final decisions until the next game session. My ulterior motive in doing so was to ensure that Phase Four had the feeling of the new beginning that it was intended to be. Everything up to this point had been aimed at enabling this new beginning to take place (with a few bits of campaign-building along the way); they had transitioned through multiple settings, each of which would have been suitable for ongoing campaigns. This was intended to create the sense that what was coming would exceed all the others, as it was the one chosen as the focus of this new campaign-within-a-campaign out of all the possibilities.

There is some similarity in this to the approach that I will typically take when starting a new campaign, regardless of the genre. At first, it will take some form of grand tour in which some of the possibilities are presented to the players; slowly, or suddenly, the PCs will be put in the position of making critical decisions for themselves, and I will start integrating those decisions into my own planning.

To be fair, I already had a strong sense of how the campaign was going to develop through phase four – I had been working on it for months – but critical decisions were still in the hands of the players, and may plans would have to be modified to take those decisions into account.

Synopsis, Session 15 (from Session 16)

Zenith-3 are on their own, in the USNA, in disguise, on a mission to prevent some domestic terrorists from detonating one, maybe two Russian Nukes that they have bought on the black market.

They have traveled from one end of Mexico to the other to reach this point, and are collectively not far from being sufficiently exhausted that mistakes could creep in.

Right now, they face the big decision of how far back in time they are going to travel – they need sufficient time to establish these “new” identities, both in the eyes of officialdom and the press, but they have only a small amount of “traveling cash” on them, courtesy of UNTIL. When they get established, they have a phone number to dial after opening a local bank account, and UNTIL will then deposit enough funds to obtain a base of operations – go too far back and you won’t have access to that.

The plan at the moment is to go back in time, get some hotel rooms here in Laredo, and get a good night’s sleep. They will then research the possible locales suggested by UNTIL for a base of operations, trying to narrow it down to something more specific than the four states suggested, finding out what they can from Laredo, then hire or buy a couple of cars and drive to them for a closer inspection.

Ideally, you will finish those inspections just as the money from UNTIL becomes available. That will give you a couple of days to do something to get noticed, and then you can head for the rendezvous and hook up with the UNTIL agent who stumbled on the situation in the first place, and who has been looking into it since.

St Barbara [aka Nightshade], you have one other option up your sleeve. UNTIL didn’t want any chance of a security leak so they’ve instructed you not to even let the Champions know about this side-gig – but Backlash, currently serving as the Chairman, showed up for the mission briefing anyway, and that means that you can take advantage of a top-secret slush fund – emergency funds accessible (and known only to) the Chairmen of Champions Organizations. Not even acting Chairmen and 2iCs and field commanders get told about this money.

Drawing on that money will tell Aleph Prime and Backlash that one of the teams is doing something covert, and the location of the withdrawal will tell them where it’s happening. Which might very well be how Backlash knew to crash that mission briefing!

It would probably avoid questions if you used the Champions Funds only as a bridging loan for a few weeks, but that means that you’ve would have more time up your sleeve, and that could be very useful.

The other consideration is that you shouldn’t go back any earlier than the bad guys reportedly obtained the Nukes – about eight weeks ago – or you risk finding yourself in an alternate timeline. And UNTIL won’t be listening for your call until 4 1/2 weeks ago. If you actually buy a property – and UNTIL thought that would be preferable if possible – you will probably need to pay a premium to avoid a delay while the paperwork gets done. This is usually 2-4 weeks. The problem is that doing so will attract attention, and you don’t want to attract undue attention!

So how long will you need? How far back do you want to go?

The players began by laying out a schedule built around the concept of a grand tour of the four states suggested as suitable by UNTIL. The basic plan was to spend three days exploring each, in two vehicles, with a fourth day as reserve and rendezvous; any unused time could be spent as “time off”. They would then choose their base of operations from the choices they had found during their road trip, and spend a couple of days arranging the purchase; one of the key considerations would be the capacity for immediate possession; the players were all cynical of UNTIL’s forecast that they would find ample choices in such a short period of time, expecting no more than two or three results per vehicle per state (the NPCs, not being ‘local’ in different ways, deferred to this assessment). They would spend up to a week outfitting and refurbishing it (forgetting completely the lesson of how quickly they could do so using their paranormal abilities, as had been demonstrated in Leon), leaving about a week to establish their new ‘superhero’ identities sufficiently to get some assistance from local law-enforcement should that prove useful before making rendezvous with the UNTIL agent. Adding all this up, and throwing in the occasional ‘day off’ gave them a total of about 31 days.

Checking the weather back then further narrowed their choices to Monday, May 26, 1986 – with departure from Friday, July 4, 11:05 AM.

They then departed, only to run headlong into another phenomenon hinted at in earlier adventures: The Astral Plane was not the blank slate that theory described. There were various aspects and attributes of local regions just as the sea along one piece of coastline will be different to that along a completely different coastline on the same continent. Normally, such phenomena can be maneuvered around, doing nothing but adding to the perceived transit time, imparting some sense of transit to the journey, and creating a little random uncertainty about the precise arrival time; but by sticking close to the one time-line, they were effectively hugging the coast instead of going out to sea and then back toward their destination, trading increased risk of encounters in the “shallows” for greater precision.

Sure enough, they encountered Dimensional Shoals caused by the passage of many time-travelers in and out of the local timeline (Warcry, an ex-member of the group, got the blame, but the PCs had themselves been popping in and out of local time regularly since the campaign started). What was more, there was a vampiric squid or maybe sharks (my notes say one thing, my memory something else) who lived in the shoals and consumed the future lifespan of time-travelers who intruded on their domains.

Even more bone-weary than they expected, but wary of the time-traveler’s equivalent of Jet Lag, they arrived shortly after the hour of Noon. They secured accommodations at the first hotel they encountered and then decided to take the afternoon off for social activities. Each went their separate ways using tourism pamphlets from their hotel to choose activities that sounded interesting – some went to the movies, one went golfing, and so on. Each also chose a lunch location that sounded interesting or appealing to them.

And that was how the rest of the game session played out.

Key Points & Notes

Notice how there is virtually no mention of the big finish to the previous phase of the adventure, nor of the transition to this next phase; instead, it’s all relating to discussions held and decisions made way back in the first part of the ‘Spy Games’ phase, and how they intend to modify the basic plan given to them by UNTIL to better suit what the PCs think they need in order to achieve everything UNTIL wants them to do.

The other source of input into this synopsis was the discussion that had taken place at the end of the previous game session. None of the players made much note of the fact that they had been delivered to the US precisely at the moment they were designed to arrive: before noon on July 4, which is when UNTIL expected the nuclear weapons to be activated. The original schedule had aimed to get them there on July 3, but they had lost a day’s travel to the various tasks foisted on them along the way.

The change of pace after the transit back in time was also no accident – the PCs had been traveling at an increasingly breakneck pace to reach this point, suddenly they had a whole month in front of them. Choosing to decompress, and engage in ‘character activities’ provided a mental reset for both players and characters. It also bought me time to make the necessary adaptions of my plans to fit within the decisions made by the players without making it an obvious stalling tactic – the fact that I was prepared with lists of the activities on offer and photos of the different venues of interest gave the impression that I was as thoroughly prepared as ever…

Synopsis, Session 16 (from Session 17)

Zenith-3 are on their own, in the USNA, in disguise, on a mission to prevent some domestic terrorists from detonating one, maybe two Russian Nukes that they have bought on the black market.

They traveled from one end of Mexico to the other in just 3 days – by way of Brazil! – but that left the team exhausted and critically short on time to do everything that UNTIL wanted them to do and then defuse the plot before it was too late.

To buy themselves some time, they have traveled into the past in the city of Laredo, Texas, located so hard up against the Mexican Border that there’s a town on the other side named Nuevo Laredo, which was your portal into the American city.

Timing was critical; while you would have liked more of it, a Hurricane struck the city on the 25th – no fatalities or serious injuries, but it would not have been conducive to carrying out your plans in such weather – so you had to make it the 26th, leaving you a thirty-three day Schedule to follow.

After a little R&R in Laredo yesterday afternoon, the team settled in for a good night’s sleep at the Laredo Six-Star Inn. All except Vala/Zeitgeist, of course, who doesn’t need much in that line of things.

Key Points & Notes

Essentially, the entirety of the previous game session was tossed out in a single paragraph of two sentences. The rest was context, a reminder of the bigger picture.

The longer a synopsis, the more baggage it conveys to the players. Heaven knows there was enough such baggage to mention – but none of it was relevant to the day’s play at hand.

Synopsis, Session 17 (from Session 18)

Zenith-3, in the Guise of Team Shadow, have traveled back in time to May 27, 1986. They actually arrived yesterday, and spent the afternoon on R&R before attempting to get a good nights sleep since they were all exhausted to some degree (except Zeitgeist [Vala], who’s an Energizer Bunny).

One by one, those plans failed for various reasons which can be generally characterized as people becoming aware of the scale of what was being proposed, and needing to change the plans for the day accordingly.

Union Jack had discovered that the funds provided by UNTIL, which would have been perfectly adequate for three days, wouldn’t stretch to thirty. Even the attempt would force the auto-shoppers to buy junk without more money. He offered Nightshade [St Barbara] several solutions to the problem, but wanted her to choose between them.

Before she was set on a decision, Basalt [Knight] showed up, having determined that there wasn’t enough time in the day to examine the number of cars likely to be for sale without some information on what capabilities to prioritize. He had a planning tool taught to him by his old partner when he first joined the Police Force which would solve the problem, but he wanted St B and Union Jack to weigh in.

They were just about finished doing so when Zantar [Defender] and Zeitgeist [Vala] arrived from a before-the-shop-opened expedition to the local Bookstore.

Defender was worried about the logistics of researching targets and planning the activities to follow, but had come up with a plan – do the research as you travel between potential sites using the best guidebooks, selected according to a logical argument that he had devised. Union Jack had also deduced that the mission at hand was likely to center on Oklahoma or Northern Texas, which he called “Zone Red”.

The last to arrive was Specter [Runeweaver], who had been delayed by ‘oversleeping’ (compared to the others) because of a nightmare. He was worried about the dangers of having too big an impact on History, especially if zeitgeist [Vala] were to go “Fundraising”, something she had mentioned the previous day.

With that, the day’s activities were almost completely revised. As before, Union Jack and Basalt would shop for a pair of used cars for the team to use, based on what the team could afford and the criteria that had been identified as most crucial. Runeweaver and St Barbara would make a fast trip to the Bahamas, from where they would withdraw some of their accumulated UNTIL salaries to bolster the team’s finances. As soon as they had done so, Zeitgeist [Vala] would relay their new operating budget to the car-shoppers so that they could take the information into account. She, meanwhile, would have scouted and hired an automotive workshop for the next couple of days. Zantar [Defender], with Zeitgeist’s assistance when she was free, would, in the meantime, be preparing a set of protocols on Base Selection for the team to discuss.

St Barbara decided to withdraw $6000, a thousand more than the minimum Union Jack had estimated would be needed from each of the two senior team members. Runeweaver decided to withdraw a thousand more than that again, to provide an extra buffer.

Weather: Increasing cloud, light winds growing stiffer in the evening, High 86°F, Low 68°F, Sunset 8:27PM.

We rejoin the team as Vala is bringing Union Jack and Blackwing up to date (telepathically) while they finish their lunch. St B and Runeweaver have a choice to make – you can grab a light lunch in Barbados and then head back to Texas to put the cash in the hands of Union Jack, or you can head back immediately, hand off the cash, and then get some lunch.

Key Points & Notes

There was a lot of roleplaying and no small amount of comedy that has been glossed over in the preceding summation.

Vala started her in-game life by stealing from drug smugglers and other criminals, and taking advantage of rigged games at illegal Casinos, and proposed such activities as a way of enhancing the team’s finances, using the euphemism “Fundraising”.

Vehicle Choice

I wanted the players to make important decisions with minimal input from me. The net results of my research into available vehicles (described in How Good Is That Rust-bucket In The Showroom Window? had yielded 163 possible vehicles – some of which were obviously unsuitable for the intended purpose. These were as fully specced-out as I could make them, incorporating data from multiple sources and modifying model histories to integrate with the campaign history as necessary. I didn’t assume that the design imperatives would remain the same, or that the vehicles that were historically popular were going to remain so – everything was adjusted to factor the backstory in. I had histories for each model that a car dealer could relate if engaged on the subject by a PC.

All of which requires some method of cutting through the resulting fog to arrive at the vehicles the characters (one PC and one NPC, who had to agree) would select as the most suitable.

To make this a player-driven choice, I devised an interactive system. Here’s the relevant part of the adventure, extracted:

Just as she is delivering that decision, there is a knock on her door. It’s Basalt [Blackwing] in his new “civilian” identity as Frank Hudson.

(roleplay. He has ordered breakfast for two – more Breakfast Tacos and another pot of coffee are on their way. He intends to eat three of the Tacos himself but the fourth is up for grabs – who wants it?).

* Zantar [Defender] did some simple maths. If there are 60 cars in the lot that we have to go through, and we spend a whole six minutes looking at each, that’s six hours, plus time for lunch. If there are 100 cars, we can only spend about 3½ minutes looking at each. That’s not a lot of time. Having defined the problem, he then dropped it into his lap and left to deal with his own problems.

* What’s needed is some way to sort the wheat from the chaff. If they can give a ‘no’ to most of the cars in a minute or so, that leaves a lot more time to look at the ones that you might actually want to buy.

* Normally, it’s really hard for car buyers to pick a priority, but he has a trick that one of his ex-partners on the force taught him years ago to cut through the fog. But this is a potentially important choice, so he thought St B should provide some input. And anyone else who wants to weigh in – they will all be living intimately with the results for several weeks.

* What he’s done is get a bunch of playing cards, and scratched off the printing that was on them – St Barbara, the price will be on your bill when you leave – and written down a number of key parameters, for example Size or Age or Price. Some of them have sub-options – for example, under Horsepower, you’ve got the choice – as it was new, as it is (estimated), or as it will be after he and Union Jack tune it up. There are also three blank cards that can be used to drop a second of those options into the mix – for example, you might care most about gas mileage at highway speeds, but want to add gas mileage in stop-start city traffic somewhere else on the list.

* You take each of the cards, and you put them in rough order. There are 13 of them. The end goal is to get a top ten, in order, so you can start by picking the three least important things and discarding them. Next, look at the options and pick between them. If you want to add a second option, you have to discard another of the cards that you’ve kept.

* Once all the options are selected, it’s time to start prioritizing. Pick the one that you care about the most, and put it on top, then the one you care about the least, and put it on the bottom. Then look at the ones you have left, and do the same thing again. Do that five times, and the job is done.

> Explain the sortable database, and the ranking system, and that I will simply sort the database according to the sequence of criteria that the players choose. It will take 10-20 uninterrupted real-time minutes to actually rank all the cars, and spit out the top half-dozen or so (2).

> Note that there’s no entries for ‘safety’ or ‘comfort’. The first impacts on all sorts of other values but is hard to actually nail down. An attempt was made to define the second in terms of the extras, but that doesn’t address the fundamentals of one model being more comfortable than another. That’s why you want three or four choices from each dealer.

* The sales lots are also busy places – if we select a vehicle, there is no certainty that it will still be available by the time you go to actually buy it. That’s another reason for having multiple choices.

* He also needs to know what sort of budget they have available. He understands that Union Jack has been looking at that question.

> Let the other characters fill him in on what has been decided in that respect.

> Make this a group activity. You want debate. Use Union Jack to stir the pot and prod as necessary. NOTE THE RESULTS.

(2) it actually took less than five. But I took a 5-minute break at the end of it.

There was lots of discussion and roleplay before the decisions started to be made. Somewhere, on a scrap of paper, I have a list of the criteria as decided and prioritized by the players. One moment, and I’ll go look — — — — here we are:

1. Economy, Highway, Tuned-up
2. Current Condition
3. Best Highway (Cruising) Range, Tuned-up (3)
4. Worst Urban (Stop-start) Range, Tuned-up (3)
5. Rust Level
6. Size
7. Height (headroom)
8. Estimated Price, factoring in expected discounts (4)
9. Top Speed, Tuned-up
10. Horsepower, Tuned-up

The rejected criteria were:

• Age
• Acceleration
• Gearbox (Automatic or manual)

These were all sorted in the sequence from most desirable to least desirable and the rows then numbered so that the results could be sorted by dealer.

(3) These are usually provided as a range because there are so many factors that can affect the result. “Best” means taking the highest value in this range, “Worst” means taking the lowest.

(4) Every dealer has vehicles that have been on the lot for a long time. They don’t make money that way; after a while, it’s better to discount the price and get rid of a white elephant. Vehicles that are especially collectible or rare are a different story. Both factors can be taken into account in assessing how much below the sticker price the dealer will go (and how reasonable that sticker price is in the first place).

Exploration Methodology

So the players had now decided how they were going to fund their setting-up, and how they were going to decide what they were going to spend their money on. Next was how they were going to actually look for a Base Of Operations. Through the NPC, Zantar, who was the closest thing they had to a logistics expert, the next section of the adventure explained the problem and the solution that he had devised, for player approval:

You are just finishing that up when Defender (and Vala?) arrive(s), with a bundle of books held together by some sort of glowing energy. Defender doesn’t seem to need to carry them, they are following him around. You hope too many people didn’t see him like this!

“Good morning, Sue-Ellen, Frank, Roger,” he says, effortlessly reeling off the cover names that were assigned to you. “I’ve ordered Breakfast to be delivered here, something called “Fish Tacos” – and an order of their regular breakfast offering for anyone who wants it.

“Sue-Ellen, we have two problems, and I think I’ve partially solved one of them – but need your approval and input before I can continue, and need Carmen’s assistance and your authorization to solve the other one.”

He starts by spreading open a map of Arkansas. “I got this from the concierge. The price will appear on your room service Bill when we chuck out.” On one side, there is a map of the US with several states crossed out in black texta.

“To maximize our efficiency, which Roger tells me is important, we need a search pattern that delivers us as closely as possible at the end to our next state of interest, with the exception of the final state, Nebraska, where we want to be as close as possible to our chosen new base. This reduces the time and fuel from one search to the next, and then to the results.

“Texas abuts one corner of Arkansas, so that’s where we start. The far corner connects to the next state we want to search, so the best approach is simply to divide the state in two along that diagonal, and each team zigzags back and forth between places of interest, like this:

“And then we do the next state the same way, and so on. The last one is a bit trickier because we don’t yet know where we want to go from there. The point of greatest accessibility is the center of the state, so that’s what the search pattern givers to us. Put it all together and it looks like this: (show map 15-8-02-01a)

“I should also point out that when UNTIL recommended these four states, they did so for a reason. In particular, the states they left out should be considered significant. They didn’t want us to spend any more time than necessary in Texas, and they didn’t want us going to “Oh-Kloh-Homer” at all until we met our contact in the city of the same name. That has to be because they consider that to be the enemy’s stronghold, and Texas abuts it. Roger pointed that out to me, and he’s right – there is a Zone Red that we need to avoid until we’re ready for action. And that includes when we’re making pretty for the cameras.”
(Pause for reply)

“That’s the easy half of the problem. Then we have to appraise the specific routes that need to be taken.”

He turns the map over, unfolding it still more and more again. “This is what a quarter or so of Arkansas looks like.” (show map 15-8-02-01b)

“At this scale, it’s too hard to read without looking very closely. But when you do that,” he says, passing the map around, (same map, zoom in)

“…you discover that each state has hundreds if not thousands of potential targets for us to investigate. What we need is a way to separate the fishes from the squid.
(Pause for reply. Union Jack comments, ‘this sounds familiar’.)

“To start with, trying to research that many targets – something like 16,000 or so of them – is utterly impossible. If we have 20 hours in the library, that’s 72,000 seconds, with three, maybe four of us searching – doing a state each, let’s say – so that’s a total of 288000 seconds, best case. Or 18 seconds per location.

“Vala’s abilities can speed us up 10-fold and it still wouldn’t be enough to be useful.

“So I thought of an alternative – “He is interrupted by a knock on the door. It is room service, with a platter of Fish Tacos, a tall jug of iced water with slices of lemon and lime floating in it, and another pair of Breakfast Tacos. “Who wants these?” asks Defender, waving at the ‘Breakfast’ Tacos.
(roleplay)

When he finishes stuffing his face with the fish, and licking appreciatively at the sauce on the vegetables, he returns to what he was saying before he was interrupted.

“This morning, I went out and bought us these,,” he says, opening the bundle of books. As he lays them out on the table, you can see that he has bought two copies of a guidebook for each state (including Louisiana, which you aren’t supposed to be going to, but just in case….)

“No bookstore can lose shelf space on inadequate products. Any book that is new might not have been tested sufficiently, and so must be suspect. It follows that if said shelves contain multiple copies of a book that is dated last year, given the perishable nature of the information content, it must be a more than adequate guide to the subject. If the books were no good, they would have been taken off the shelf and sold at a discount. These guidebooks all met that standard, several times over.
(Pause for reply)

St Barbara, you suddenly realize that it’s about 7:30 AM – and no bookstore that you’ve ever heard of is open at this hour.
(Roleplay)

“I propose that we use these resources to do our research while we are traveling from one inspection target to the next,” announces the Kzin – who remembers his cover name? Anyone? (It’s Brust)

“If there is no information in the guide-book, and we deem it worthwhile, we can stop and gain information from the most reliable source, the town itself. Most, I have learned, will have some form of community information center, or a gossipy shopkeeper, or a mayor, or a policeman – someone who can tell us about the location. Most of the time, it won’t be worth the effort.

“That’s my solution to the problem of optimizing the efficiency of our research,” he concludes. “But it’s only a partial solution, because it does rely on us asking the right questions of each location that we investigate. We need to construct a protocol, or perhaps several, that will permit us to separate the fish from those pesky squid.

“I have some ideas on that, but I need your approval, and Vala’s assistance, to craft such a suite of protocols – and you will then need to sign off on it. I submit that this would be a far more efficient use of the time earmarked for research than the current plan.”
(Pause for response – roleplay)

Key Points & Notes

I wasn’t making those logistics up – Any time you have a lot of specific things to research and not a lot of time, you have one mid-sized number divided by a very large number, resulting in a fairly small number.

The alternative was for the players to decide on some criteria to restrict the search, in the same way that they had done with the car choice. I figured that this was at least a 50% chance, but the esteem in which the NPC is held when it comes to analysis like this left them all comfortable with his solution.

Someone knocking on St Barbara’s door and announcing “We’ve got a problem” is an ongoing joke within the campaign. But it’s justified every time. It should be noted that St Barbara is a PC, and the nominal team leader.

The “I’ve ordered breakfast” line was another ongoing joke for this sequence exclusively – it reflected (1) the casual approach the PCs had all been taking toward their budget, and (2) the natural desire to put their team leader (who each thought they were awakening early) in a better frame of mind to deal with the policy decision they were placing in front of her.

By the time these decisions were made, the ‘action plan’ the PCs had drafted was history, irrevocably shattered by the actual ‘boots on the ground’ experience and some brutal realities.

The Used Car Lots and Dealers

These were created out of whole cloth and were the first things emplaced within Laredo that didn’t really exist. I deliberately made the dealers ‘colorful characters’ to facilitate roleplay during what might otherwise have been a fairly boring set of exchanges. I made sure that both had a realistic business plan, given the existence of the other just across the road.

Wormwood Motors holds about 60 cars and is considerably smaller than his rival across the road, which has at least half-again as many. Glancing over the two, you can see distinctive differences in the way the two owners operate. Sal Wormwood is the more traditional in approach; he prices more consistently and is more content to let cars sit until someone makes an offer he can live with.

“Six-shooter Al” adds a much thicker profit margin, but is far more willing to do a deal; if he makes a small loss, he will make it up on the next sale, and either way, he frees up space in his lot for another car, another chance to sell. Overall, he probably makes more money per sale than Sal.

But his approach is even more psychologically-beneficial than this first glance suggests – customers are more likely to buy if they think they are getting a deal that may not be there, tomorrow. By making more room to dicker, he makes it more likely that he gets a sale, and by inflating the asking price, he not only gets to look more generous, he makes it more likely that the price he eventually gets is still enough that he turns a small profit. So he makes more per sale, sells more frequently, and hence is prospering. He might look ridiculous in his white cowboy three-piece suit, but he definitely has more going on under his hat than just his hair. At the same time, Sal’s approach lets him look more generous, with lower prices across the lot – so he probably makes more sales than he otherwise would, too.

This situation actually holds some benefits for the customers, too, you realize. Sal doesn’t have a profit margin that can both afford unhappy customers AND let him be relatively stiff-necked on prices – he has to be as honest as used-car salesmen get. And Al’s whole modus operandi is based on volume, on making sale after sale after sale – and any whiff of unscrupulousness would put that at risk. He, too, has to be as honest as they come in his line of work. Just count all the tyres before you try and drive off the lot.

An interesting thought comes to you as you start working through your chosen used-car lot, starting in one corner and working along the rows of cars systematically – what if the pair of them are secretly in cahoots? It’s so perfect a dynamic that they have set up between them that, while it would not be impossible for it to be a lucky coincidence, it’s also just as possible that both of them are a great deal sharper than they look. Something to bear in mind as you’re bargaining!

There are other differences. Wormwood has more big cars and fewer trucks, and is more haphazard in its layout. If there’s an organizing principle, it isn’t obvious.
This results in people wandering all over the place – but also means that you can come to look at a low-cost Chrysler and fall in love with the big Cadillac parked beside it.

Al has more small cars and more trucks and less in-between, and is far more systematic – small cars here, then medium, then the big iron, while the back of the lot has trucks and vans organized the same way but in the other direction – small stuff near the big cars, big trucks and prime movers near the small family cars. He seems to think about his potential market, his customer base, in a more coherent fashion than Sal.

Al has more variety in models, but more of the same model – row after row of Escorts – while Sal has more makes and fewer of any particular one.

They don’t have to be used-car salesmen – they could be selling horses, or carriages, in a fantasy campaign, or whatever – replace “models” with “breeds” or “makers”. Its the personalities and sales strategies that shine through.

At the used car lot, decisions were made that resulted in choosing a Red Cavalier – a 4-door in better condition than the Navy one they had first looked at, a range of about 600km, pristine condition, $5040 – and a Purple Buick Skylark Station Wagon, not a lot of get-up-and-go, range of about 540km, air con, cassette deck & radio, slight fading, superficial rust but mechanically sound, $7850 on the sticker.

Meanwhile, Vala had located a workshop and hired it for a couple of days. The intent was to spend time on both cars getting them into absolutely tip-top shape. At the workshop, Union Jack pinned a pair of lists to the noticeboard. The first list contains everything that is contained in a GOOD servicing. These should be done annually for continued good operations, according to Union Jack and Blackwing. These 18 items probably don’t need to be done, but doing them will only take 2-3 hours per car and will reassure.

After that comes the five-year/10000-mile service, a 16-item list, the first half of which is basically an engine rebuild taking 6+hours each engine. Parts of the rest of the list are quick, but some are mechanical and may take many hours.

Base Selection Criteria

This was far too important a matter not to let the players dominate. Since the plans were being developed by an NPC, this was particularly tricky. I also needed his proposal to reflect his personality, experience, and intelligence – so it had to be logical but with scope for players to have input. I was also aware that by this point, the players were beginning to have decision fatigue, which also complicated the situation.

Since the process starts by draining the oil, which will take half an hour, once it has begun, there’s time for a team meeting to get Defender’s results.

Vala, you know these already (having helped him frame the questions), and should have formed opinions on each subject; it can therefore be assumed that you will be in a position to give those thoughts before anyone else responds, but to give you time to come up with those opinions, I’ll actually come to you last, okay?

★ First, he thinks that 4 separate protocols are needed according to the size of the community being examined.

At the bottom of the scale are what he calls “drive-through” assessments. These are communities of a few hundred people or less that one of the teams passes through en route to somewhere more promising, and it’s a protocol for assessing an unusual and unexpected possibility in a place you expected to find none.

Above that is the “small scale” protocol, for communities of up to 2000 people or so. 1000 people is enough for somewhere to be called a “City” using the crazy American nomenclature.

Second from the top is the “middle scale” protocol, for communities of 7000 people or less. 5000 is the target required for a community to be called “a township” within the American system, but they can be more dispersed than the demands of a city. A single township can consist of a number of smaller communities including ‘cities’.

Anything bigger than that is a major city. There won’t be too many of these, and most will have 10-20000 people or more.

Defender’s thought is that each of these would present different concerns and different opportunities, and so they need to be assessed differently.

★ Next, he wants to avoid a rigid structure. These assessments will be fairly seat-of-the-pants and there’s too great a risk of leaving some factor out, and the importance of factors might vary from one location to another.

What he wants is to simply list factors that should be considered in rating a potential target – and what sort of targets the teams should be looking for. Each car will have three team members in it, and they should debate the value of each possibility until they reach a consensus. He thinks a score our of 5 should be simple enough as a tool for summing up an impression.
(Pause for discussion)

★ The most important factor is going to be size. There are six team members, who are used to having their own space around them. On top of that, you may need to accommodate the occasional guest or two. On top of that, you may need to accommodate a couple of staff to look after the place when the team aren’t around. That’s 8-10 bedrooms, and anything that size is going to be rare. So the teams will be looking for a very big place, and nothing that’s not big enough should even make the short-list.
(Pause for discussion)

★ The size of the grounds will be significant too – the larger they are, the harder it will be to maintain them, but the more privacy they will provide. Again, no hard- and- fast rules, a judgment call on the balancing of two conflicting value assessments.
(Pause for discussion)

★ Privacy is another item that needs considering, even beyond the size of the grounds. Communities that are likely to be prone to gossip and rumor should score lower unless there’s a way to avoid that gossip – so it becomes more valuable for a possible location to be already furnished in a smaller community, for example.
(Pause for discussion)

★ Next, he pulls out his map of Arkansas, and folds it to show the corner closest to Texas. In the part of Texas that is visible, he’s circled a number of place names. (show map 15-8-03-07)

He thinks that the name should not be one that can cause confusion if someone is talking about it.
(Pause for discussion)

That shouldn’t be enough to rule a really good possibility out of contention – but it should cost it a point or so on the 1-5 scale, and that might be enough, depending on how many contenders they find.
(Pause for discussion)

★ The smaller the community, the more important it will be for a major center to be reasonably close – the team will want furniture, and may need to purchase high-end security systems, generators, communications gear, and computers and who knows what else. A medium-scale target will have some of this, a large city should have it all, a small target might not have any.
(Pause for discussion)

★ To avoid people noticing when the team come and go, there should be at least three and preferably more roads in and out of the community. But any sort of traffic hub that’s not too far away – another judgment call – would count.
(Pause for discussion)

★ The general location is something that should be borne in mind. The current mission may be focused on the Southern states, but this is supposed to be a long-term mission. Do they want somewhere closer to the West Coast, where the team will have allies, or to the East Coast, where the majority of missions are more likely to take place because that’s where the majority of the population live, or somewhere more central, or somewhere South or North? The ability to come and go via Canada might be very convenient at times. And they now have friends in Mexican places, who might occasionally be helpful. There’s something to be said for everywhere, but those somethings are not created equal.
(Pause for discussion)

★ After that, he leads into a discussion of any political or social red flags. He’s not sure what they might be, he doesn’t know America well enough – but he’s sure there will be some. Are they enough to cause an outright rejection, or should they be treated more like the place names?
(Pause for discussion)

★ And, while thinking on the subject of location, there should be a penalty on the score for anywhere that’s too close to Union Jack’s “Zone Red”. While proximity to the current mission shouldn’t be a positive factor in the base location, any risk to the current mission has to be avoided.
(Pause for discussion)

★ Local political considerations. And national political considerations. This country is in the middle of reinventing itself after the greatest possible tumult short of Civil War, and it has no idea of what the ultimate shape will be. Again, there will be red flags but he doesn’t know what they will be, and thinks that should be left to the judgment of the teams doing the assessment. A place that’s big on social contributions by residents might suit some team members personal preferences, but the expectation of involvement should probably constitute a red flag.
(Pause for discussion)

★ Price. How important a factor should Price be – especially since some locations will be overpriced, and some will be relatively cheap, according to the basic laws of statistics. Should price even be a consideration? Should a great price be worth an extra point on the 1-5 scale, and should an awful price cost a location a point? Or is price no object?
(Pause for discussion)

★ Availability. The team want to take… what was the term, again? Oh yes, “immediate possession”. This is something rare on Earth, as he understands it, and will make the purchase stand out if it’s something the team have to ask for when they buy – but will raise no eyebrows if it’s already on offer. So that’s got to be worth a higher rating.
(Pause for discussion)

★ Maintenance. The team can do some of it themselves, but that’s not a priority for them. So let’s assume that someone else will have to do at least some, if not all, of it.

That someone will expect to be paid. Who will pay them? UNTIL? Us? The first is an easy out – but they might not agree to it. The second is far more constraining – but it improves security by limiting dependence on the UN organization, and that might be really important given the American political attitude at the moment. Sure, UNTIL expects that to change sometime after the Presidential Elections this November – but that’s still six months away, and it might take years after that to become official. That’s a long time for such a security exposure.

But how much staff can the team reasonably afford? Should a location with an income stream to pay for its own maintenance get bonus points, or even be mandatory But an income will raise new security issues, even while the income allays other problems.
(Pause for discussion)

★ Speaking of security, Supervillain activity in the region should be an immediate down-check if it’s a regular occurrence. That probably kills off the major cities, but it needs to be said. We aren’t looking for a place that needs superheros, we’re looking for a place where we can pretend not to be superheros, so that we can go wherever we need to.

Superhero activity is another no-no. If the Crusaders have been there in the last 30 days or so, or twice in the last 60 days, or three times ever, there’s too great a chance of exposure. Especially if they decide we’re Super-villains – and they might.

So, super-activity of either camp in the area is problematic. How big is “the area”? It’s not reasonable for activity at one end of the state to impact a contender at the other. A mile away is too close. Where should the line be drawn? Or should that be another factor left to the team doing the assessment?

★ This is already a long list, but he’s not done yet, not quite. The choice of these four states may be most appropriate for this particular mission, but he wants to suggest for discussion that they write off western Nebraska and maybe Western Kansas as well, and spend the time saved looking into a couple of Wild Card contenders that might be better long-term choices. He’s not going to suggest which ones they might be – the team has plenty of time to nominate a couple. Chicago maybe, or Detroit, for example. Or Houston. Or Dallas. Or maybe somewhere more East. Or more West.
(Pause for discussion)

★ And, while he’s on the subject, he wants to point out that while some of the team are from cold climates, and Union Jack puts up with cold weather, Frank and himself are from more tropical climates. Maybe that factor alone should be enough to rule Nebraska, and maybe Kansas, out completely.
(Pause for discussion)

Those are his thoughts on the subject.

This was less about making up the players’ minds for them and more about delineating the criteria that they then had to take into account. There was spirited discussion about some of the points, on others the decisions were quick and pretty unanimous. Decision fatigue was less of a factor than expected because of the roleplaying / bullpen nature of the discussion. As a general rule, they accepted this list of things to consider, but went with the recommendation the NPC had made right at the start – don’t have a rigid structure. They did decide to rule out Nebraska and Kansas (too cold) in favor of elsewhere ‘to be decided’.

About half the content on this list actually came from out-of-game conversations with the players and especially with the player of St Barbara, the team leader.

What emerged from the discussion was a protocol for choosing between each assessment.

1. Every contender found would be rated by the three people in each car, who would debate the subject until a consensus score out of 5 was decided.
2. Each day, each car would choose their top three results. These would then be compared with the top three of the previous day (if any) with the three best overall resulting. This deliberately limited the scope of the discussion to be had.
3. That meant that at the end of each state, when the group reunited, each team would have three recommendations. Each person within the team should choose one of them that they felt particularly strongly about and try to ‘sell’ it as a proposal to the other trio. A consensus would then be reached as to the three best choices in that particular state.
4. At the end of each state after the first, the three best from that state would go up against the three best so far. Whenever the teams decided to stop looking, they would therefore be left with just three choices.
5. They would then rank those choices in order of preference. This would give them a first choice and a couple of backups in case that choice was no longer available.

I had been working for months on these explorations and had some idea of how long it would take to play through the full four-state explorations. I also had a much clearer idea of how many contenders the two teams would have to rank – remember that the players all thought that three or four each per state would be going well.

Synopsis, Session 18 (from Session 19)

Zenith-3, in the Guise of Team Shadow, have traveled back in time to late May, 1986. Over the 24 hours or so since you arrived, your plans have largely gelled into a coherent form.

Union Jack is now in charge of the money, after planning a budget to stretch the available money that was intended for three days to the 30-days or so Team Shadow intend to use for setting up operations. Union Jack had also deduced that the mission at hand was likely to center on Oklahoma or Northern Texas, which he called “Zone Red”.

Basalt then used a planning tool to set priorities that would make the search for the best car choices relatively painless instead of logistically impossible. As a result, he and Union Jack have purchased a Red 1983 Chevrolet Cavalier and a Purple Buick Skylark Station Wagon that has been given the hot-rod treatment by a previous owner, and have started an extensive inspection-and-maintenance operation to get the two vehicles into absolutely tip-top condition.

Zeitgeist, meanwhile, had found and hired the premises of Jerry’s Truck And Auto for 48 hours as-is.

Zantar, at the same time, had been considering the logistics of the research task facing the team and found that their plans simply wouldn’t work. He came up with an alternative approach using guidebooks that could be described as ‘research on the run’.

Since he already had his head wrapped around the subject, Zantar, with assistance from Zeitgeist, next started planning the parameters, protocols, and processes of the team’s forthcoming explorations.

Specter’s been thinking ahead, deeply concerned over the fine line that the team will have to walk later in the mission – they will need to establish their credentials as superheros in these identities, but can’t do anything too significant without changing history in unpredictable ways.

Specter and Nightshade then spent the morning on a high-speed side-trip to the Bahamas, where they withdrew the additional funds that Union Jack thought necessary from their accumulated UNTIL salaries. After lunch, they went shopping for camping equipment and supply reserves.

While the Red car was lifted into the air with the hoist and its oil was drained, Zantar went over the results of his planning with the team, much of which boiled down to a multitude of factors that could influence a decision, but one of the major ones for which there could be no half-measures was the size. Anything else would be a decision influence, but the team was six people strong, and could conceivably grow further. Throw in room for some maintenance staff and guests and eight bedrooms – and reasonably large bedrooms at that – was the absolute minimum for a Base Of Operations.

To help disguise the team, it was decided that Basalt would function as the Leader of Team Shadow with Union Jack as his Second.

Tonight, Union Jack and Basalt will be maintaining and upgrading the cars, with the assistance of Zeitgeist and Specter, respectively. Zantar will begin planning specific routes for each car to take to maximize the amount of exploration possible in the limited time and budget allocated to the purpose. Nightshade was in charge of keeping the team fed and bolstered with coffee.

Key Points & Notes

There had been a lot of deciding-how-the-players-were-going-to-decide, but as a result, they all felt a sense of ownership about the decisions. This was important because the two NPCs, because of their known skill-sets, were going to be making crucial decisions, but I still wanted the players to be in the driver’s seat.

This was achieved, first, by having the methodology be discussed and agreed-upon amongst the players even if the initial proposal came from one of the NPCs; and second, by having the NPCs then formulate and make recommendations and proposals and not decisions.

There was, in other words, a clear chain of command with the players on top.

The decision about the leadership came about quite accidentally, it wasn’t on anyone’s radar. The basic logic was as follows:

Team Zenith-3 were known to have two humanoid females (one human and one with angel wings), two humanoid males (one with a bizarre form and one that used magic), and a male Kzin. Team Shadow would have two humanoid females (both apparently human, but one with angel’s wings if you looked closely enough and were resistant to psionic manipulation), three humanoid males (one with a bizarre form and one that used magic), and a male Kzin. The fact that the individuals appeared to be different, and that they had one more human male in the team, might not be enough to keep their identities as Zenith-3 a secret, especially if the smallest female was in charge.

This was mentioned in an off-the-cuff comment, but it evidently fell on fertile ground, because the players grabbed the idea and ran with it. It wasn’t something that needed addressing right away, but was aimed more at the next phase of the campaign when they would become ‘active superheros’ in the USNA environment.

But they felt that it was better to make the change of command now, so that the policies of Team Shadow would be those put in place by the new commander, and he had time to get used to being in charge. That would all help distinguish Team Shadow from Team Zenith-3. Which was fair enough.

The decision to put Basalt (a PC) in command and Union Jack (NPC) as his deputy was something of a surprise, but — okay, before I can explain that, I need to briefly touch on the history of the character.

• Basalt started with the identity of Knight and one particular player. That character was transformed into a gargoyle by his suit of armor when he attempted to remove it, the suit becoming his stony skin. This change was intended to be temporary, recurring whenever triggered by attempts to remove the armor.
• When the player who owned the character (briefly as it turned out) left the campaign, writing the character out was an option but it would have deeply impacted the team’s capabilities and the planned plotlines. So, with that player’s blessing, Knight acquired a new owner/player, the transformation became permanent because the new owner liked the idea, and took the name Blackwing.
• He slowly became more and more psychotic, manic, and overconfident, which led to a burst of violence in which several enemy NPCs were killed. While exonerated by the various legal systems to which he was answerable (one in a spectacular trial in which Denny Crane (Boston Legal) went up against Special Prosecutor Perry Mason. The results were a two-all draw in which the character was exonerated on a technicality.
• His own command was not so lenient; he was reduced in rank and pay, and placed on six month’s probation, during which time he was not permitted to hold any office or authority within the team. Since he was nominally second-in-command and primary tactical commander in the field, this effectively stripped him of the offices he had already earned.
• At which point, the second owner had to step out of the campaign for personal reasons and Knight/Blackwing acquired a new owner. We reinvented the character from the ground up, keeping only the core concepts, and I planned a gradual rehabilitation with the new owner’s approval.
• This rehabilitation took the form of the character gradually becoming more violent and feral again, but obviously fighting the urges. His self-confidence began to get out of control again as his sense of personal invulnerability grew. And then a figure in black started showing up, stalking the character as it were. Eventually, there was a pre-arranged confrontation which left Blackwing vulnerable, and the figure in black divested him of the armor – which his group had been in the process of ‘unraveling’ when the PC stole it, seduced by its’ dark power – but revealing that the physical changes that it had made in the character were permanent, but would now only manifest when the character wanted them to; the rest of the time, he appeared to be his normal, human, self. Blackwing became Knight once again – but there were aftereffects. Those were directly addressed in Phase One of this adventure, described in Part One of this series.
• Significantly, at much the same time, the character received notification that his six-month probation was up. There had been a change at the top of the administration responsible, with a by-the-book no-nonsense type being installed, who thought the character was guilty as sin (because he was) but who would follow the rulebook explicitly, giving him a second chance – but keeping a closer watch on the character than usual. If the character was truly reformed, all would be well; if not, sooner or later there would be another slip-up and they would throw the book at him. This, too, was part of the rehabilitation process.

Okay, so now that you know the history of the character, you can see how momentous a decision it was to put him in charge – the fact that he was an ex-cop, a detective, and a citizen of the USNA all weighed into the choice. But mostly, it was about style and competence and a signal of trust in the character.

The choice of an NPC as second-in-command was equally surprising, for different reasons – while an expert in administration, bureaucracy, planning and problem-solving, he was new to the team and still finding his way. But he was the type who took his responsibilities seriously, and this signaled a confidence in his abilities that he himself didn’t feel.

This was a change in campaign direction that was player instigated – phase four of the adventure would be, in part, about my getting used to the new command structure and style at the same time as the players were.

It raises an important point, though, and that is the reason for this extended discussion: either the players are in charge, and your NPCs do nothing but lay options at their feet, or your NPCs are in charge and the PCs have to extract what little freedom they can find within the objectives and guidelines laid down by that authority.

Either can work, so long as the players know what they are in for. In this campaign, the players were in charge, no matter what their NPC superiors came up with – though they at least paid lip service to NPC directives. But it’s important for the GM to understand the PCs relations with authority and construct his adventures accordingly, and to make that relationship clear to the players, too.

“Who’s in charge here” is always an important question. “What makes you so important?” is the natural followup, and a question of equal importance.

If the PCs were in a James Bond campaign, there would be no question that M was in charge – but that 00-whatever would have a free hand so long as he delivered results without causing the government embarrassment. That’s the sort of authority structure that I wanted the players to enjoy in the Team Shadow sub-campaign; call it Limited Autonomy.

Excerpts from Session 19

Nightshade went on a Pizza run – the PCs choices reflecting the characters’ personalities and backgrounds. When she returned, food in hand, the purple Station Wagon is up on the hoist. Standing under it are Zeitgeist, UJ, Basalt, and Defender, with many fingers being pointed at the underside of the car, whose tyres look even more oversized from this angle.

As you hand out the Pizzas, UJ brings you up to speed. “In an effort to make this vehicle look road-legal despite his modifications, the previous owner got creative. They cut almost an inch out of the chassis lengthwise – axles and all – then spot-welded them back together, then used paint to hide the modification.

“At the same time, they increased the rake of the side-panels slightly, so that the tyres look like they jut out far more than they actually do when measured. That meant rearranging the layout in the engine bay – but neither Basalt nor myself have ever seen the engine bay of this particular make and model before, so it wasn’t immediately obvious. More to the point, they’ve also had to cut a slice out of the oil pan to get it to fit.

“It’s completely mechanically sound, and would stay that way for maybe 1000 miles. And then it would hit a hard bump and the oil pan would rupture, and the engine would ‘lunch itself’ to use the colloquialism Zantar offered.

“Worse still, the chassis modifications are quite illegal. That’s why our inspired mechanic tried to hide them. We were just discussing what to do about it.

“What do you think?”

Before the player answered, I had them make a Leadership roll – using Bureaucracy if she hadn’t actually taken the Leadership skill – at +80, a modifier which means that most of the time the character would succeed if she was half-competent in the field.

>> Success >> You’ve had plenty of this sort of decision thrust on you over the last couple of years, while leading the team. So it would be very easy for you to offer an opinion. But, if you do, the ‘new’ team leadership would always be leaning on you, at least in private, and so wouldn’t be prepared to make good decisions when in Public. So the correct answer is “Basalt and you are in charge, now”.

>> Failure >> You’re not in charge anymore, but are just as entitled to an opinion as anyone else. So, what do you think?
** The car yards are open until 8PM. Since the car is illegal, it’s illegal to sell it without disclosing the modifications. The salesman didn’t, but you have no witnesses to that fact – which means that if the owner of the sales lot, Al “Six-shooter’ Dunning, wants to fight it, he would have a fair chance of winning.

** The next best car inside the team’s budget is the White 1983 Lincoln Continental Mark VI Pucci Designer Automatic Coupe. The good news is that it’s more than $4,500 cheaper.

** That means that intimidation is the best weapon you have – if you can convince ‘Six-shooter’ that you will fight, you might not have to.

** Al has already seen UJ (in civvies) when the cars were bought, but Basalt did most of the shopping and negotiating on the lot. UJ should pose as an international gangster and Basalt as his personal Mechanic and Driver, and should do most of the talking. The ‘mobster’ should also have a lawyer, a bodyguard, and a secretary. Nightshade is an easy choice to play the last role, and Zantar is more intimidating than a Specter in civvies, so he should pose as the Bodyguard. That leaves either Zeitgeist or Specter to be the lawyer. The question is, which would be more effective: Zeitgeist pretending to be a lawyer while maintaining her illusion, or Specter pretending to be a lawyer while Vala taps minds and provides legal guidance to Specter and comms for the fakes.

An opportunity for the players to work as a team while hamming it up in some spontaneous role-play – a bit of light relief after the serious tones of the preceding game session. This is part of actively planning the intensity and emotional pacing of the adventure – if the serious, deep-and-meaningful moments are going to stand out, they need to contrast with ‘the rest of the time’.

And I got to have fun as the not-quite-scrupulous salesman, Sal Wormwood, as a bonus – so I got to chew the furniture, too.

They succeeded in intimidating him enough to get a cheque (I think Americans spell it ‘Check’) out of him, made out to the car yard across the road, and a small refund in cash. This enabled a denouement of the brief sequence with Al “Six-shooter” Dunning, who wasn’t sure whether to cash the cheque or frame it.

Various ‘daily life’ snippets followed – weather, shopping. But this led to the critical decision to upgrade both vehicles – installing air conditioning in the Cavalier and upgrading the brakes on the Lincoln to disc brakes all round. This addressed the major shortcomings of each vehicle.

There was a casual demonstration of Zantar’s powers. This enabled him to write far more quickly than would be possible by hand.

Ultimately, he hands over five books of directions for each car and a set of maps – one for each state, including a ‘rehearsal’ book giving directions through Texas to an overnight stop somewhere called “Dalby Springs” near the Arkansas border.

Zantar then reclines for a nap; he doesn’t usually show how much using his powers takes out of him, so this suggests that he’s loosening up around the team a little more, a side-benefit to this team retreat! After a few minutes, however, his tail begins to twitch and then to swish from side-to-side, something that only happens when something is bothering him. Basalt, hand-holding is one of your responsibilities now – Perception check to see if you notice at +40. (At first, he didn’t).

>>Failure>> You don’t notice as he grows more and more agitated until his eyes open and he announces loudly “It makes no sense!”

When prompted, Zantar explains that he’s been reflecting on his “secret identity”, and those of the team, prompted by the conversation a couple of days ago about the team composition being “a big hint” to Team Shadow’s real identities. Basalt, everyone should probably hear this, knowing Zantar.

“Individually, our identities make sense, and if we were a random assemblage of individuals, would be acceptable within the bounds of chance. But, at the conclusion of the phase of the mission that we are about to commence, we are no longer presenting ourselves as a random assemblage of individuals; we are presenting ourselves as a non-random assemblage of investors, supposedly pooling our resources to buy a significant property somewhere, and furnishing it to our separate tastes, and then becoming co-occupants.

“This raises logical questions – how did we all meet? What made us decide to pool our resources and buy a shared dwelling? And because those individual identities are so well-tailored to us as individuals, there are virtually no points of intersection to provide satisfactory answers to such questions.

“Moreover, what are the odds of a group of unlikely investors consisting of an English Human, a Scandinavian Male Human, A Scandinavian Female Human, a Generic Seeming-human, An American Male, and a Kzin, coming together at the same time as a new superhero team consisting of an English Human, a Ghostly Male Human, A Female Human, a Generic Seeming-human, An American Male made of rocks, and a Kzin, finding each other to unite as a team?” (Pause for response)
“From a collective point-of-view, our meticulously-prepared civilian identities make no sense, and pose a security risk to the entire mission.

“Well, we can’t do anything much about our superhero team identities. But perhaps we can do something to remove the unlikelihood of such a group coming together in civilian life, providing a distracting rationale and justification for our mutual assemblage.”
(pause for response)

“It won’t last for long; it will soon be an open secret within the local community that a human has sold an expensive dwelling to the new superhero group. But it should last long enough, if it makes enough sense.”
(pause for response)

“Our civilian supposed identities are, currently,

• Myself, Brust, tourist and inveterate explorer;
• (Pointing at Basalt) You are Frank Hudson, Manhunter;
• (Pointing at Union Jack) Roger Woodchild, Prospector;
• (Pointing at Specter) Isaiah Lucas, Ski Instructor and Competitive Woodlogger;
• (Pointing at Nightshade) Sue-Ellen Wilson, Talent Scout, and,
• (Pointing at Zeitgeist) Carmen DeLamber, French Heiress, recovering from extensive plastic surgery performed in the South of France.

“The only one of those that demands the appearance of wealth is DeLamber. What if she is the sole investor, and the rest of us, her employees? Does it not make more sense for such a person to be traveling with an Entourage And could we not further enhance our believability by retaining the backgrounds provided by UNTIL as our past lives prior to coming to work in the employ of Miss DeLamber?
(pause for response)

“If we adopt this premise, then… let’s see…

• (Pointing at Zeitgeist) Carmen DeLamber, French Heiress and traveler., seeking to add to a portfolio of investments globally in anticipation of market resurgence when the US rejoins the global community, with a perfection that can only come from plastic surgery;
• (Pointing at Basalt) Frank Hudson, her Bodyguard, Head of Security and former Manhunter;
• (Pointing at Specter) Isaiah Lucas, her personal trainer, former Ski Instructor, occasional Competitive Woodlogger and would-be romantic liaison whose affections for DeLamber are unrequited;
• (Pointing at Nightshade) Sue-Ellen Wilson, her Personal Assistant, former Talent Scout and Assistant Film Director,
• (Pointing at Union Jack) Roger Woodchild, her Business Advisor, former Investment Banker, Business Owner, and Prospector;
• and Myself, Brust, her maid, spiritual advisor and fashion consultant, a tourist and inveterate explorer who ran short of funds, needed to find employment, and discovered that he liked it.

“Suddenly, it makes sense that we are a group. Our cover stories have more depth and believability. We can develop personas that are somewhat different from our own based on those backgrounds, that will serve to further distinguish those identities from our superhero personae.”

(discuss. — UJ will observe that UNTIL’s not very good at thinking outside their usual parameters; they are used to providing identities for individuals who can come together coincidentally, but not building identities for sleeper agents, which is effectively what Team Shadow are.)

This took something that the team had taken for granted (and largely ignored during their Mexican jaunt) and put it firmly in their own hands – the civilian identities that they were going to adopt. There were some fixed points due to the documentation that had been provided, but outside of those restrictions, they had free reign, and could adapt their identities to suit whatever situation they encountered when out ‘shopping’ for Bases of Operations.

The proposal was accepted as a workable basic concept (with some amusement) but the identities were not fixed in stone.

This was important to reinforce that while NPCs may have made pivotal decisions on the characters’ behalf, those characters were not stuck with the results; this was very much their campaign.

I should also point out that I work hard in these canned speeches to let the personality of the NPC show through. I don’t know to what extent the players are aware of this, but I like to think that it helps distinguish them from each other, and helps define those personalities in the eyes of the players, in exactly the way that their character would observe and interpret the personalities.

Finally – and it’s worth repeating if I’ve mentioned it already – notice that my primary role is to stimulate and lead the conversation. I regularly pause to let the players discuss or respond to events, with the implication that I will modify the canned speech that follows as necessary.

If you examine the structure of those ensuing paragraphs closely, though, you will find that most of them work either way – either starting a new and related chain of thought for discussion, or extending the old one into new areas if the players had nothing to say.

Once all the work is finished, and clean-up is completed, only one task remains before an early night: Who is going to be in which car? Zantar has already determined that the planned routes are more efficient if the Red Cavalier (car 1) takes the second of his planned routes, and the White Lincoln (car 2) takes the first.

Zeitgeist and Nightshade are to share a tent, which is difficult to do if they aren’t in the same car. Union Jack recommends that – as the command structure of the team, and as the two most experienced drivers, he and Basalt should be in separate cars.

That makes Specter and Zantar co-passengers. Basalt, they are the most likely to disappear into their own heads at any given moment, and Union Jack doesn’t have enough experience with the team to keep them sensible. Besides, you’re in charge now, and you probably want Runeweavers’ Mana recharge problem where you can keep an eye on it (he’s becoming addicted to Mana boosts).

That would put Union Jack in with the ladies, and you in with the Bobsy Twins. That puts three of the team’s four weirdness magnets in the one car, but that can’t be helped.

Route 1 is more likely to encounter the KKK and other white supremacist groups; the apparently-Caucasian trio with two women is less likely to get into trouble with them than the all-testosterone car with a Kzin in tow, provided St Barbara can be trusted to keep her temper in check when she doesn’t have command considerations to distract her. A relatively stable character like Union Jack should help with that.

So the most logical allocation is for you, Specter, and Zantar to take route 2 in the slightly cramped confines of the Red Car (given the size of the occupants), while Union Jack, Zeitgeist, and Nightshade take the ultra-comfortable White Whale onto Route 1.
(Get Decisions)

Synopsis, Session 19 (from Session 20)
Game session 19 had been a transition from one phase of the adventure to another, and that was reflected in the synopsis. I was a little short of time, so some of it is quoted directly from the text of the previous session instead of being rephrased the way that I usually do.

Anyone who wasn’t paying attention last time will be surprised at how much has taken place while they were distracted. The team are camping in Dalby Springs, Texas, a ghost town with a still-functional church, supposedly haunted by the ghost of a Vampire. It also happens to be the place where Zeitgeist has encountered a Psychometric Owl, and where the team were attacked by Giant Leeches, and where the two cars will split up and head their separate ways to ferret out potential bases of operations in Arkansas.

Last time started with the discovery that the previous owner who had given the purple station wagon the hot-rod treatment had made a bold attempt to make the vehicle at least look street-legal by making a series of even-more-illegal modifications involving slicing an inch out of the chassis length-ways – axles and all – then spot-welding the two halves back together before folding the body walls to fit the now-narrower body.

This discovery led the team to impersonate a mafia boss, with driver, bodyguard, lawyer, and accountant in tow in an attempt to intimidate Sal Wormwood into taking it back and refunding the purchase price. They gave it their all, playing up to their allocated roles for all they were worth, but Sal has been intimidated by the best and didn’t yield. Fortunately for all concerned, however, there was a 48-hour cooling-off period, so he was happy to refund the purchase price, less a small handling fee, of course. After everyone danced around the size of this ‘handling fee’ for a while, a deal was struck in which a personal cheque was issued by Sal for the price of their chosen replacement car and the balance paid in cash – which just about cleaned his cash reserves out until the banks opened in the morning.

The team then went across the road to Al “Six-shooter” Dunning’s lot and bought the White Lincoln Continental, getting almost $4500 back in the process. Before the maintenance on the cars was complete, they also added Air Conditioning to the Chevy Cavalier (the Lincoln already had Air Con) and disk brakes all ‘round on the white car in place of the Drum brakes that were standard.

Zantar completed planning the team’s exploration routes, presenting each car with a set of five volumes of detailed navigational directions designed to maximize results given the time and budget limitations, operating on the basis of an average speed of 40 mph. How close reality will track to that pace is still unknown.

The Kzin then turned his attention to the cover identities provided by UNTIL, concluding that they made sense individually but were so inadequate collectively that it was almost laughable. He suggested that rather than an unlikely coalition of investors, the group become ‘employees’ in the service of one wealthy investor, using the backgrounds provided by UNTIL as more remote backgrounds.

Zeitgeist was reinvented as Carmen DeLamber, French Heiress and traveler., seeking to add to a portfolio of investments globally in anticipation of market resurgence when the US rejoins the global community, with a perfection of appearance that could only come from plastic surgery.

Basalt became Frank Hudson, her Bodyguard and Head of Security and a former Manhunter.

Specter’s cover identity of Isaiah Lucas became her personal trainer, former Ski Instructor, occasional Competitive Woodlogger and would-be romantic liaison whose affections for DeLamber are unrequited;

Nightshade’s “Sue-Ellen Wilson” was re-imagined as her Personal Assistant, a former Talent Scout and one-time Assistant Film Director;

Union Jack was re-created as Roger Woodchild, her Business Advisor, a former Investment Banker, Business Owner, and Prospector; and

Zantar re-imagined himself as Brust, her maid, spiritual adviser and fashion consultant, a tourist and inveterate explorer who ran short of funds, needed to find employment, and discovered that he liked it. And who had picked up human customs and vocabulary from someone who was a little bit what Dick Emery would have described as “Fruity”.

For those unfamiliar with Emery, think of the character Serge from the Beverly Hills Cop movies.

The question was also raised, but not settled, on how closely guarded their identities as superheros should be. Ultimately, with Union Jack in one car and Basalt in the other, there was someone with the authority to judge situations as they arose – bearing in mind that the ultimate mission was to prevent the detonation of a couple of black-market nuclear devices.

The final decision to be made was who should travel in which car; the two females were to share a tent, so they would obviously be together in one, which meant Specter and Zantar in the other. Basalt considered them to be the two most likely to disappear into their own heads at any given moment, and Union Jack didn’t have enough experience with the team to keep them sensible; and besides, he wanted to keep Runeweavers’ Mana recharge problem where he could keep an eye on it. That put Zeitgeist and Nightshade in with Union Jack, at least for the Arkansas leg of the expedition, and Specter and Zantar with Basalt. Which put three of the team’s four weirdness magnets in the one vehicle, but that couldn’t be helped.

Route 2 was more likely to encounter the KKK and other white supremacist groups; the apparently-Caucasian trio with two women was less likely to get into trouble with them than the all-testosterone car with a Kzin in tow. Finally, the attributes of each car meant that the red family-sized Cavalier was better suited to Route 1 while the white whale of a Lincoln was more appropriate to Route 2.

The next morning, 5 weeks until Nuke Day, at first light, the team made their departure from Laredo and journeyed the 575 miles (925 km) to Dalby Springs, where they were to camp. This road trip took almost 13 hours by the time rest and meal breaks were factored in, and would contain events none of them would ever forget – from the discovery that Zeitgeist couldn’t tolerate any sort of oil or grease in her food (but dry salads were, for the most part, fine), so Car Two would have to preference Italian and Greek cuisine, to no-one being brave enough to try BBQ’d Armadillo.

Dalby Springs is a remarkable place – a ghost town with a church still in active service, a cemetery supposedly haunted by the ghost of a Vampire (who didn’t trouble the team, thankfully), the discovery of the Owl with the psychometric abilities, which Zeitgeist has decided to make a pet, and then the discovery of the giant leeches (about a foot long) cohabiting your sleeping bags – it was an eventful night. We rejoin the team as everyone else attempts to get back to sleep after the excitement, with Vala to awaken them at first light.

Key Points & Notes

I initially intended to use the Texas leg of the trip as a dress rehearsal for what would become the basic pattern of the rest of this phase, but ended up rewriting it into a more traditional narrative form.

Some of this was important in terms of how the process was going to work.

Excerpts From Session 19

I’m incorporating these to expand further on some of the points raised in the synopsis above.

Departure right on Dawn, 6:44 AM

Zantar wants the other car to take the lead to see whether or not they can follow his written directions without a safety net. The first challenge is to get onto Interstate 35.

Each car has someone driving and dealing with logistics, someone navigating, and someone reading the guidebook and taking notes on potential bases of operations, but in Texas, there are no guidebooks to consult and no potential bases to note, meaning that you can split the navigation. Who’s taking the first stint – Zeitgeist or Nightshade?
(decision)

The directions were explicit and detailed:

• Head North to intersection
• Turn Right onto Bristol Rd
• Turn Right into Mines Rd
• Turn Left at next intersection onto Las Cruces Dr
• Road curves right to pass under the Interstate and becomes Shiloh Drive
• Turn left at first intersection after the interstate onto San Dario Ave, stay in left two lanes
• When road curves right, go straight ahead onto the Interstate on-ramp

  Total distance 1.72 miles @ ave 30 mph

Once on the Interstate, you begin ticking off the miles and the place-names. Botines, Encinal, Artesia Wells, Cotulla, Gardondale, Millett, Dilley. In Texas, gaps between settlements come in four sizes: Enormous (double digits apart in miles), Large (6-9 miles), Typical (2-5 miles), and neighborly (less than 2 miles). All told, that’s 78 miles covered as the clock ticks over to 8AM.

When you slow slightly for the Dilley Bypass, Team Red Car’s Fuel Gauge reaches ~3/4 full. It’s more than 4 miles later before Team White Car’s gauge does likewise. Conclusion: Car 2 is more efficient at cruising speeds.

Still on the interstate, you continue racking up the miles and landmarks. Derby, Pearsall, Moore, Devine. That carries you another 50 miles, and the time is 8:50AM – time to pull over, grab a drink and stretch legs for 10 minutes (along with anything else that might be necessary).

Back onto the interstate for the second leg of your more than 500-mile journey. Lytle (spelt with a y and one t), plus just shy of another 8 miles gets you to San Antonio. After the break, you start to really feel the heat of the day ramping up. In the Lincoln, Union Jack first tries retracting the sunroof, but the slow progress through the internationally-famous city makes it less than effective. So he closes it and activates the brand-new Air Conditioning system. Immediately, the engine note goes up a notch, and Jack finds that he has to put his foot down that much harder to achieve any given speed. He estimates a ten percent drop in available engine power, which will drop top speed to about 95 mph.

In the Cavalier, the other team are finding the same thing – turning the air con on is like suddenly climbing a very steep invisible hill.

San Antonio is the biggest city that the route takes you through, at more than 40 miles of stop-start traffic. It’s already 10:45 AM by the time you emerge out the other side, an hour-and-a-half after you entered it.

A little more than half-way through, both cars’ fuel gauges dropped to 1/2 full, which means that Car White has clawed back everything that it lost at cruising speed by being more efficient in city traffic than Car Red. This surprises the heck out of several people, St Barbara amongst them; she would have bet that the mid-sized Red Car would have it all over the enormous lump of metal that is the White Car, but Basalt and Union Jack seem to have worked wonders.

Not long afterwards, the I-35 merges with Interstate 410. This is one aspect of the US system that almost all of you struggle with every now and then – the fact that one stretch of road can be three or four different highways at the same time. The usual practice is to use the lowest number to refer to the highway, but that doesn’t mean that the higher number has gone away!

These narrative passages were carefully-devised tests – if the players truly felt in charge, then they would react and respond to each paragraph, talking amongst themselves about the trip as though it were actually happening and this was a highlights reel of their travels (which is what happened). If they felt like mushrooms without real control over events, they would have simply sat and listened.

If the latter condition had prevailed, then I would have to revise my planned approach to the rest of this entire phase of the adventure, inserting more player control no matter how much more difficult it made my job as GM. As it happened, that wasn’t necessary (thank goodness!) – which is exactly what I had been trying to have happen, of course.

Of course, there were further decisions to be made anyway, all contributing to the structure of each day’s travels when they started looking for a Base Of Operations:

Hanger slaked, you get back on the road and rejoin the Interstate for the next stint. If you have two drivers in a car, now is a good time – half-way through the day – to swap over. That would mean Nightshade and Specter taking the wheel of the White and Red cars, respectively.
(decision)

Once again, you get down to ticking off the miles, and for the first time, you can really wind the cars up to their top speeds. As expected, both of them seem to top out at about 95 mph, but the Red Car struggles a bit more to get there. Passing Cedar Creek and Wildwood take you to the point where Route 71 merges with Route 21. You continue and get into Bastrop in short order, where you are supposed to take a left turn onto Jackson St.

6 hrs 22m since departure, the Fuel warning light comes on in the White Car. The Red Car’s needle, despite its smaller fuel tank, is still hovering a little above the “empty” mark. But this is where Zantar thought you would need to refuel, so tick off another ambitious goal achieved. This was a real test of the engine tuning by Union Jack and Blackwing, and it seems that they have come up trumps. Note that you would probably have made it easily if not for the Air Conditioning.

The schedule calls for a 10 minute break, plus 5 mins to refuel. There are no less than 5 service stations in town; but the best prices are at the last of them, Conoco. Fuel there is very cheap, only $3.45 a gallon.

Car Red $50.50 to refuel, Car White $66.81

There needs to be a regular (almost continuous) effort, whenever you aren’t adventuring in the here and now, to get players (and hence characters) into the headspace appropriate to their surroundings. Even in very conventional settings like this one, I had to keep pushing and poking the fundamental of “it’s 1986 and we’re in Texas” into their heads. All sorts of things, from social dynamics to entertainment to communications to economics are going to be different.

In this instance, it was “Fuel is very cheap” followed by a number – which tells the players what ‘cheap’ is in these parts at this particular time – and then hit them with the cost of a full tank of gas in the vehicles they have chosen – with economy one of the main considerations, remember.

One more point is worth noting in the way of explanation. Most of the adventure was written in a full-on text editor with highlighting capabilities, multi-column capacities, and so on. It looks like this:

There are five aspects of the page that bear discussion.

Acts

First, rather than categorize the content as Phase this or that, I have broken the structure of the adventure down into Acts. These are a little more granular, a new act signaling a significant change in the style of the content. Color and font are used to make these stand out. Ideally, you don’t want to move from one Act to another mid-session.

Scenes

Each Act is subdivided into Scenes: A significant change in the participants, a good spot to end play for the game session, a change in location, or a change in the subject matter – these are all good reasons for a new Scene Number.

Again, a fancy font and spacing above and below are used to make these stand out. It helps if most of the scenes are of a similar length in playing time, so that you can tell at a glance whether or not you are likely to get through the next scene before the end of playing time for the day. I will drop notes at the top of a Scene that I think will run longer than usual (one that’s shorter tends to be visually self-evident).

The information contained in the scene title is also worth noting. The main title reads (as you can see), “Scene 7: 6:12 AM, Fri 30 May, 1986 (Texas, USNA)”. This contains the scene number, the time it is expected to start (adjusted on the fly if the PCs delay or dilly-daddle) the date according to the location, and that location. And notice that the word processor doesn’t recognize the abbreviation USNA and so has thrown up a red underline. As a subheading, I’ve also noted the countdown – as time gets shorter, this always ramps up the tension. Right now, it’s a very relaxed 5 weeks.

The Footer

To make this legible, I’ve had to trim out the white space.

This contains three panels of information. On the left, we have the campaign (Zenith-3 / Regency), and the adventure number (015). In the middle, we have the name of that adventure (Part 1: Tangled Web) which also contains the name of the sub-campaign (A Necessary Fiction). Finally, over on the right-hand side is the page number, and a count of the total number of pages in the adventure.

A Different Editor

The Texas Trip, and the Arkansas explorations to follow, were not written using this text editor. Instead, I used a plain text editor which offers a couple of very useful features – like having multiple documents open, side-by-side, at the same time, and working with large documents. What I give up in exchange for these benefits is virtually all formatting control. No font size, no bold, no italics, no highlighting.

So I’ve picked up a couple of conventions – I’ll be replacing these as I spot them, because Campaign Mastery can render them, but I might miss one. A word or phrase in =equals signs= is considered to be in Italics. A word or phrase to be stated literally (usually in a foreign language) is placed in carats <>. And that’s about it. Other conventions – some of which you’ll have noted, such asterisks to denote information to be given to the players when they ask the right question, or Double-Right_Carats >> to indicate branching within the adventure, usually as a result of a skill check, and so on – remain unchanged.

I still use the full word processor to write my synopsis, though, and to add roleplaying sequences, such as the one where Zeitgeist met her owl.

Two Columns

The text is divided into two clearly-separated columns. This is to make it easier to read. Documents need to be functional first and pretty a remote second or third.

The synopsis is highlighted.

In fact, every synopsis has been given a different highlight color to help separate them. All I have to do to find one is scroll to the bottom of the document and then scroll up until I get to a highlighted section.

Again, the focus is on making the document useful.

Further excerpts from session 19

I debated whether or not to excerpt the material below. It’s a summary that I wrote up of the process that the players were to use to evaluate potential bases. Ultimately, even though it was lengthy, I decided that it was useful in terms of describing the content to follow.

While you pack up your tents and other camping gear, and (inevitably) discover that it doesn’t quite fold up and store as compactly as it did when you unpacked it, Defender reminds you of the procedure his plan is based on:

• Stops are divided into two classes, drive-throughs and full evaluations. The first means that you simply keep your eyes open as you drive through town, the second means that you actually drive around town looking for possible bases.
• One person drives and monitors logistics like fuel and time; one person navigates, following the detailed notes provided by the Kzin, which can be varied if you see some reason to do so; and the third person is custodian of the guidebooks. Roles can and should be swapped around every now and then.
• As you approach a stop, Guidebook-person reads aloud anything they think pertinent from the guidebook about the place that the team is about to explore. Once in town, they are responsible for taking any notes that the team consider necessary.
• Navigation-person is responsible for keeping track of where the car is, and which way they have to go, and giving the driver timely directions. In some cases, Zantar has been quite specific, in most he’s had to leave internal routes to the discretion of the navigator & driver.
• There are lots of considerations that could contribute to someplace being a potential Base Of Operations – or detract from suitability; far too many, in fact, for there to be any hard-and-fast guidelines. Instead, as you leave town, you spend a few minutes discussing your impressions of any specific possibilities, and give each a rating out of 5, which those in the car should reach a consensus on, compromising as necessary.
• The one critical factor that can’t be ignored is size. The team need at least six private quarters, plus one or more for additional guests or members, plus one or more for personnel recruited to keep the Base of Operations maintained while the team aren’t in residence, plus any staff needed to keep ongoing commercial operations functional. Eight bedrooms is considered a minimum. Such dwellings are likely to be fairly rare.
• At the end of the first day, each team should pick a top three contenders. At the end of the second day, the choice of top three is whatever they have found that day, plus the chosen three from the day before; and so on until the teams reunite at the designated rendezvous.
• At the rendezvous, each team tries to convince the other of their three choices, preferably with each person in a car taking one of the three favorites and championing it. The group then tries to find consensus on a top three for the state. This top three will them become the standard against which other states will be judged.
• It’s accepted wisdom in the team that UNTIL – who estimated that a search of this type would turn up a suitable location in just a day or two were being wildly optimistic, and had no real idea of what the team would potentially require in a long-term Base Of Operations. It is hoped that each team will find four or five a day.
• To prevent bias and prejudging of the other team’s discoveries, Zeitgeist will consciously “lighten” her contact with the team in the other car, but there will be regular “check-ins” on progress each night and every now and then, and in particular will avoid any particulars or impressions about any potential bases that are uncovered. If assistance is needed, it will only be available after such a check-in, so priority number one will be to hold on until check-in time. As a general rule, people will be on their own. Check-ins are at Zeitgeist’s discretion.
• The driver will be responsible for team expenditure, and will hold the money, which will be divided according to typical refueling costs. Union Jack will only make available the portion of the budget that is allocated to that particular state, plus a contingency that has to cover the WHOLE trip – once that money is gone, it’s gone. In an emergency, Nightshade or Specter can make another trip to the Bahamas for more, but this is a security risk and should be avoided.
• Route 1, which is to be followed by the Red Cavalier and Team 2, is to the south and east of the state of Arkansas. It covers an estimated 928 miles plus explorations, and has 45 major stops. Assuming an average speed of 40 mph, that works out to about 20 minutes for each major evaluation on average – some may take longer, some less. The red car has a cruising range of 350 miles to a fuel tank, but using the engine at any other speed is less efficient. The tank shows empty with about 52 miles range to go, and the fuel warning light with about 35 miles to go.
• Route 2, to be followed by the White Lincoln and Team 1, is to the west and north of Arkansas. It covers an estimated 1132 miles plus explorations, and has 69 major stops. At the same average speed, that gives only 8½ minutes per stop, which doesn’t sound like enough – but if the team are quick to decide there’s nothing of interest, Zantar thinks it will be. But there’s slack built into the schedule if they need it – up to an entire extra day and a half. Finding and evaluating possible contenders is more important than keeping to a schedule. What’s more, the teams have plenty of money if they aren’t frivolous about using it.
• Finally, Zantar has highlighted key passages in the general introduction to each guidebook that he considers to be a primer on each state, which guidebook-people should read to the others in their respective cars as soon as they get underway, and in any other odd moments they find the time if that’s not enough.

From a more metagame perspective, each time you locate a specific base, I will give you the image reference numbers that describe it. I can use those to locate specifics about each one as needed. I also want to emphasize that almost every contender that will be found will be a building that is now, or has recently been, for sale, in the relevant community, in real life. And 99.9% of the guidebook information is absolutely genuine and from two sites – Wikipedia and The Arkansas Encyclopedia!

Organizing The Road Trip

This carried the game forward to what turned out to be the most complicated and challenging period of the entire adventure, at least in terms of organization.

This is a location-driven series of encounters with buildings, communities, and occasionally individuals both likely and improbable.

I started by sketching out two routes, each covering half of Arkansas as thoroughly as possible, of approximately identical length, using Google Maps. Extensive screen captures documented the route, and gave me a list of ‘target towns’. These were divided into two classes – drive-through and extensive investigation, based mostly on their size.

Next, again using Google Maps, I retraced those routes and took careful note of the driving directions. Each stop was given a simple number, preceded by the route number. I also made a note of the expected speeds based on some fictitious standards that I came up with. The results look like this:

236 Artist Point to West Fork

-> Highway 71 North via Winslow, Brentwood
7.1 Miles @55 to Winslow

236 Winslow -> Highway 71 North

4.8 miles @55

236 Brentwood -> Highway 71 North

4.3 miles @55

236 Pitkin Corner

-> Woolsey Rd and McKnight Ave
3.3 miles @40

This describes the route from one major stop (Artist Point) to another (West Fork) with a number of drive-through evaluations along the way at Winslow, Brentwood, and Pitkin Corner. It defines a block of time in which attention will be on the team in that particular car (route 2 so that’s the White Lincoln with Nightshade, Zeitgeist, and Union Jack).

This information is plugged into a spreadsheet that allows me to handle the complications:

• Time spent traveling between targets (calculated from the distances and speeds);
• Time spent driving around communities (either measured as a distance using google maps, or guesstimated as a time and converted back into a distance using a speed estimate);
• Regular stops for rest breaks (one every 2hrs or so, unless a meal break is taken);
• Meal breaks (usually targets of opportunity depending on what foodstuff-providers are available);
• Allowance for time lost to encounters;
• Refueling stops;
       (etc)
• An effective total distance traveled at optimum speed for fuel efficiency;
• Fuel tank capacity remaining;
• Fuel gauge reading;
• Ahead or behind – the schedule for each team makes certain assumptions about average speeds and how long each type of assessment will take. This tracks where the teams really are vs where the schedule expects them to be. In general, the base estimates sounded tight but doable; the reality is that they average much better on both distance and time than expected, and get hours ahead of schedule.

This enables me to implement policy decisions taken by the players – start at dawn each day, so much allowance for meal breaks along the way, work for 12 hours, then find a campsite for the night. Because the spreadsheet automatically updates, if the players decide to spend ten extra minutes somewhere, I can update the whole thing as fast as I can load it. Oh yes, after 6 hours behind the wheel, the drivers swap out if there’s someone else in the car who can operate the vehicle.

These then become the initial division points in the adventure, i.e. the different Scenes. I work hard at keeping these roughly the same length in playing time so that I can shift focus between the two groups (Two PCs and one NPC in each car) at regular intervals.

The next two steps are undertaken simultaneously – writing the scene, and assembling a concordance. The latter simply tracks the breakdown of scenes – one scene might consist of a number of stops or just one, or – on rare occasions, a long stop will get broken into two or more parts.

Each scene has a standard format (which I throw out the window when the narrative warrants):

T## Name

Relative Concordance

GUIDEBOOK
Text

EVALUATION:
Text, Pic ref, Time

CONTENDER #:
Text, Pic Ref, Time
[one entry for each contender]

Total Time: n mins

VERDICT: (if Contenders)
CONTENDER #1:
Text, rating
[additional Contenders]

FUEL:
Tank status

DIRECTIONS:
Text

GO TO T## NAME

=========================================

The theory is that each leg of the trip is taken up by (1) discussing any contenders the team found, and (2) reading the guidebook entry for the next target. Since one is about what has just happened, and the other is about what is about to happen, it made sense for this to be the break-point between scenes, making each more self-contained.

Let’s spend a minute or two looking at each of these items in detail, with what prep work I have to do to prepare an entry for game use:

T## Name

T is either 1 or 2 – team one refers to the Red Cavalier on the south-eastern route, team two refers to the White Lincoln on the north-western route.

At a major stop, the ## goes up by one (01, 02, 03, and so on). Minor stops (Drive-through evaluations, where the team simply drives through town, not stopping unless they see something interesting) keep the number of the preceding major stop.

The major stops are the places that Zantar (an NPC, remember) – knowing nothing more than the name, the economy and geography of the state, and the location on a map – felt most likely to have a base of operations. Size was an obvious factor, and so was uniqueness of name, but a lot of it is the GM’s instinct.

I will also generally add a time-check to the heading, taken from the spreadsheet.

Relative Concordance

This is simply locating the team in time and place. For “day one”, after a lot of work (and re-sequencing the whole thing at least three times, I interwove the journeys into one long narrative (almost 55,400 words). For “day 2”, that wasn’t possible because there were too many optional choices available to the players; it was going to be a lot easier to have two narratives open side-by-side and simply switch between them at flagged points.

That means that the day one concordance is all about what the other car is doing as this narrative starts; I couldn’t maintain that one “day 2” so those are about how long its been since we last looked in on the car and what may have happened since.

GUIDEBOOK Text

This is the section I research. I look at Wikipedia, I look at the Arkansas Encyclopedia, and I try to think like the combination of a Guidebook writer and editor. This is basically the history of the place, some demographics, anything interesting about its economy, and anything else that may be of interest. If that doesn’t get me a reasonable guidebook entry, I’ll search more generally, without expecting much.

But everything then gets filtered through, and modified by, the campaign history.

I’m actually quite proud of the Guidebook entries that I’ve compiled. If it weren’t for the distortions introduced by that campaign history, they would probably make quite a good guidebook in real life!

If all else fails, I’ll extrapolate from the images that I found for the Evaluation section (including some that I already know won’t be of sufficient size or quality to get through the filtering that gets applied).

EVALUATION Text, Pic ref, Time

This is where I show (and tell) the PCs in the car what they see, hear, etc, as they drive through the town, and give the NPCs impressions of the place if that’s relevant – mostly, I leave that interpretation up to the players.

95% of the images that I use are genuine, the results of careful google image search. Another 2% are tweaked or modified in some way – that occasionally includes local maps of the settlement. And the last 3%? Two percent are screen captures from Google Street View (usually edited or modified slightly to keep everything looking consistent – it’s unusual to go from ‘not a cloud in the sky’ to ‘about to pour down any minute’). And that leaves 1% that are completely fictitious because I simply couldn’t get what the narrative required any other way.

Next, I sequence these into a narrative – the goal is to tell the story of what the settlement is supposed to be like (and in most cases, actually is like, according to the research done). The guidebook entry and the evaluation narrative work together – the first sets up an initial impression, the second fills in the blanks (and sometimes contradicts the first).

This is intended to be as interactive as possible in play. I’ll use all sorts of tricks to achieve this – mostly of the “if they spend an extra X minutes doing Y, I need something later to delay them X minutes.” It might be roadworks, or a slow driver that they can’t overtake immediately, or whatever – it basically just chews up time. Or, if the possible action is one that will speed things up, it will come with its own delay to keep the schedule on track – possibly in the same town, possibly somewhere completely different.

CONTENDER #, Text, Pic Ref, Time

To be a contender, a place has to have, or be capable of having, six or more bedrooms (one for each team member), and be available for immediate occupation. Everything else is negotiable.

In theory, contenders get found ‘in the middle’ of the tour through the town, but for practical reasons, most of the time they get extracted so that the players have a complete context (the characterization of the location) to place around whatever they’ve found.

I usually only use one image for each contender, carefully choosing or creating the most representative one. On the rare occasions where I need a second image, I will usually insert that (with a frame) into the main image.

The time factor is extremely subjective; it could represent going to the local library or historical society to ask about a property, or grabbing a real estate agent, or asking at the bank, or talking to the postman or the neighbors. The key principle is to tell the players everything that they need to know and could reasonably find out (which usually isn’t everything that there is to know, Bwa-ha-ha… sorry, where was I?)

I need to take the abilities of the PCs and NPCs into account, and the personalities of the NPCs as well. One is British and from a parallel world about 75 years into the future, but is a gifted bureaucrat and problem-solver (he used to be the Crown Prince’s personal ‘fix-it’ man). The things that he notices will stem from that background. The other is an alien, a martial artist, very zen and controlled, and very good at seeing through or past assumptions, enabling him to think outside the box. He knows less about humans and human society than anyone else – but is more observant and intelligent than most. One PC is a telepath, the other is a trained police detective – different approaches yielding different results.

BREAKS / STOPS

These get inserted either before or after Evaluation or after Contender listings – most of the time.

If one is due, or almost due, it’s back to Google Maps to look for takeaways. The information used in constructing these entries is therefore a blending of historical and contemporary information.

In general, colorful or unusual gets a tick; if nothing stands out, then convenience relative to their route will decide the matter. On day 2, there’s at least one point where they have to pull over onto the shoulder and break out some snacks and sandwiches packed for the purpose.

I try to use these to break up the narrative. If the NPC has anything to bring up – for example, one early question was whether or not to use scare tactics and intimidation to get someone to leave a desirable target, should it be chosen – this is often the time. Again, interactivity and roleplaying is a priority.

ENCOUNTERS

These get positioned wherever is logical – they can even interrupt other things. Anything from seeing a centaur in the distance to… well, that would be telling.

I’m very careful to estimate how long it will take the PCs to resolve an encounter, which is quite tricky to do when you don’t know how they will choose to resolve it. I prepare narrative for the most likely way(s) and base my estimates on that.

Deciding on where to place an encounter is more difficult to explain – generally, these are used as punctuation and whenever the preceding narrative seems to be growing a bit dull. I try hard to split them evenly between the two groups of PCs. If an encounter is going to take significant time, it will almost certainly get broken up into multiple scenes so that I can ‘check in’ on the other team.

Total Time: n mins

Adding up everything that takes place, tells me how much time the characters spend within the community. This gets put back into the spreadsheet.

VERDICT (if Contenders) for each CONTENDER, by number – Text, rating

This is a discussion between the players in the cars (and the occasional voice from on high from a player not there) and the NPC about the relative suitability of the possible base, any drawbacks to be noted, and so on. As the number of potential bases rises, I expect standards to go up – the movie theater may have been an interesting possibility but it comes with too much baggage, for example – its time on any shortlist will be short-lived.

The rating is the opinion of the NPC in the car. They, and the PCs present, have to reach a consensus. It’s generally a rating out of five but they’ve started accepting half- and quarter- point marks because they’ve found more contenders than they ever expected to.

It’s up to the players to document these collective opinions. It’s their choice that will decide which one eventually becomes their chosen base of operations.

I don’t think either team has yet found a five-out-of-five (but there’s been at least one four-and-a-half) – but there are some coming.

FUEL Tank status

I take the percentage fuel remaining after the activity in the community and look it up on a pair of tables that I’ve compiled, enabling me to translate that number into a verbal description. This also tells me what the remaining range in the tank is, which I will often mention. Because the spreadsheet takes into account the efficiency of the engines under different traffic conditions to calculate its answer, this bottom-lines the travel.

DIRECTIONS Text

I generally summarize these into narrative form as the full-stop on this particular location. But nothing is set in stone, and what actually gets found (Google street view) may yield variations.

GO TO T## NAME

If the same scene contains another location, this will be absent, and it’s only there for Day 2 onwards – it tells me to switch my attention to the other document and where in that document to pick up the story.

=========================================

And this marks then end of the scene, a separator to visually distinguish where the combined narrative is up to.

Very little of this shows in-game, which is all about the content, not the planning or structure.

What this does is put into practice something I’ve advocated a number of times: break a big problem or process into a series of smaller ones. In this case, I’ve broken the task of searching a state for a suitable base of operations into a series of searches in different locations, made those searches as interesting as possible (dressing them up with roleplaying and encounters) – and, because I don’t want to telegraph which places are the interesting ones, then applied the same principles to everywhere else the PCs are going to go along the way.

As the narrative proceeds, I’m using greater and greater narrative compression. The ‘routine’ has been established and can now be hand-waved.

Virtually none of this will show in the synopses – which is why I thought it important to expound on it all before what is the heart of Phase IV of the adventure gets ‘underway’ in this article.

Synopsis, Session 20 (from Session 21)

Strangely enough, no synopsis appears to have been produced for this session. I suspect that this is a confluence of two factors – going into Covid-lockdown immediately after it was played, and the ability to simply summarize the text. Or maybe I wrote it and filed it somewhere else – there’s one obvious place to check, so just talk amongst yourselves for a moment….

Nope, not there either.

In lieu of that, here’s one of the actual entries from “Arkansas, Day 1”. I’ll leave the image references in place, and add the occasional drop-in clarification in [square brackets].

T2 8+47 AM 203 Mineral Springs until 9+2

[CONCORDANCE]
Less than four minutes down the road from Tollette lies the community of Mineral Springs. Team one are still about ten minutes out of their next target, Lewisville, as Team two behold the emerald-green Water Tower (03-203a).

Within its 2.26 square miles, Mineral Springs is a town bursting to achieve the status of a City (and the federal and state funds that can be accessed with the title). It is tantalizingly close at 974 citizens, but will have to wait a year or two longer to get there. That’s all right; they’re patient. That comes, in this case, from Religion; Mineral Springs makes the top ten religious communities within the US. Almost everyone attends either the Baptist (03-203b)

…or Presbyterian churches here in town (except one Lutheran couple who drive to Wilton for services every week). As a general rule, the residents don’t care *what* religion you are, so long as you are actively religious and *seen* to be actively religious. That said, you don’t think a Satanist would be welcomed.
(pause for comments)

EVALUATION:
It isn’t too long before you come across the Luna Hotel. (03-203c) (5 min)

This, according to your guidebook, was a cheap provider of accommodations in the town until a rival, the Original Springs, opened about a block away (03-203d). (6 min)

There isn’t enough clientele to support two such operations, and the Luna lost badly to the more modern, more stylish, newcomer. (7 min) As a result, the Luna is now on the market (8 min). You need to inquire at the First National Bank (and Real Estate) to get the price (03-203e).
[notice that it is assumed that the players decided to do so.]

You are directed to speak to Wilson Hauptmann (03-203f),

…who looks as trustworthy as a Shark but works harder because of it, and is really something of a sweetheart – evidenced when he gives a couple of customers an extra month to make their overdue mortgage and knows everyone by their first names and knows the health and names of their families. He even gives one of those customers a $20 bill because she doesn’t appear to have been eating right, lately.

This is a favorite NPC construction trick of mine, which I deliberately violate a lot so that it doesn’t make me predictable – a deliberate contrast between two traits.

I should also point out that because I’m using the same laptop to display the images and read the text, I always end a line when an image is referred.

And the final takeaway – notice that this entry, from the very beginning, shows only lip service to the basic structure. There are images in the Concordance section, and the evaluation section consists entirely of a Contender evaluation!

*** He confirms that the Luna is for sale to someone with a new vision and some deep pockets. (15 min) The price is $65K+20% Fees, duties, etc = $78K as it stands.

This is a definite contender as a Base.

VERDICT:
There are some serious drawbacks to take into account. The Luna is right on downtown, which will bring added scrutiny from a curious population. You aren’t sure that any of you could pretend to be religious enough to fit in, and you aren’t sure that your cover identities would be all that credible in this social environment. That makes the Luna a 1, maybe a 2, out of 5. Perhaps the best thing to be said about it is that it takes the need for those unpalatable choices discussed earlier off the table – there IS an alternative to driving people out of their homes.
(discussion)

DIRECTIONS:
Route 27 West 13 Miles to Ben Lomond, then Highway 71 South 9 miles to Wilton, continue South 5 miles to Ashdown

Speeds

13 miles @ 100mph ETA Ben Lomond 3+0
     ~3 miles in urban areas @ 35 mph
     9 miles @ 50mph ETA Wilton 3+17
     5 miles @ 50mph ETA Ashdown 3+23

T1: 2+50
     61 min ahead of schedule
     AC: off
     Fuel Tank: a bit over 1/2 full
     lunch in apr 1 hr 40 m
     driver change in apr 3 hr 10 m
     Sched stop in apr 5 hr 10m

Okay, so there are a couple more things needing explanation. One way that I write times, and especially time intervals, is H+M. So “ETA Ben Lomond 3+0” means “ETA Ben Lomond 3 Hrs after starting this morning”.

The block of details at the bottom is a status check. Most of it proved to be unnecessary, so it isn’t anywhere near as extensive in later parts.

It says that Team One have been on the road for 2 hrs 50 minutes, and are currently 61 minutes ahead of schedule. The car’s Air Con is off (affects power, top speed, and fuel economy, all badly), and they have more than half a tank left. The rest is ‘the relatively fixed schedule’ for the car – how long until lunch, when they are due for a driver change, and when they are scheduled for the first of a couple of breaks that afternoon. I only ever tracked the ‘next three’ such events, because that usually covered everything a player might ask about.

As for what they found in this particular day’s play, that’s spelled out explicitly in the next synopsis.

Synopsis, Session 21 (from Session 22)

After several months, Australia came out of Lockdown and gaming resumed. Because it had been a while, I made the next synopsis far more comprehensive than would normally be the case.

UNTIL have inserted Zenith-3 into the USNA as a covert branch of the Champions to handle emergencies that HAVE to be dealt with even though they don’t technically have the authority to operate on American Soil.

To create the necessary anonymity, they created new identities for the members of the team – Nightshade, Specter, Zeitgeist, Basalt, Union Jack, and Zantar. They also created civilian identities for each of these superheros to occupy when not doing superheroic things.

UNTIL then teleported the team to the 5th Reich, where everyone played spy games with each other. The Reich was not at all what you were expecting, and changed the way you saw Fuhrer Muerte’s administration – from an enemy (however covert) to a government with some distasteful associations. It was probably fairer to describe it as what Nazi Germany could have been if they didn’t have Hitler in charge and actually cared about their citizens.

The Reich had connections through to House Aries of Demon, who dominated one of the political parties who were currently engaging in the Presidential election campaigns of 1986. Both parties were promising to reshape the policies of the US with respect to the rest of the world – unless UNTIL / Z3 did something to upset the apple-cart.

UNTIL had been using the 5th Reich to insinuate agents into the US for some time, so it was only natural that they use this channel to get the superheros into place to undertake their primary mission – and to prepare for future occasions when Team Shadow might be needed.

Muerte’s people got them out of Brazil by air in a light aircraft that did Mach 1.2, then ferried them to a fishing vessel which secretly had more in common with a world speed record attempt boat than it did to commercial fishing. This vessel – somehow you never quite got the name of it, which was probably no accident – conveyed you to Guatemala, in mere hours with a refueling stop in Jamaica.

Once on land, they met the representative of House Aries, their “Diplomatic Escort” and Guide, Maynor Morales. After Ragnarok, Central America and Mexico had fragmented into guerrilla states; each had developed its own methods of rapid transit, and in each, the group would have to perform some ‘favor’ for the ruler in order to gain permission to continue.

King Hector of Guatemala was the first, and his attempt to have Maynor possessed by the Ghost of a Mayan High Priest (a means of gaining control over the mage) failed; the Jeweled Egg that adorned the statue of the forgotten Mayan Deity worshiped by the High Priest was recovered and delivered as promised.

In Tabasco, King Rohaz sent them (and his two best remaining hunters) to end the menace of a “Monster” that had been taking his best men for weeks or months. The “Monster” turned out to be the Rheezok, alien mages of incredible skill and ability, each capable of casting multiple spells simultaniously, and who had a prior relationship with the human Refugees from the Empire Of Mandarin, which included Maynor Morales. By now, Morales had learned that the group he was escorting had paranormal abilities, and so they were able to join him in negotiating a peace treaty with the Rheezok. As part of that treaty, the Kingdom of Tabasco (which they had been systematically undermining) was ceded to them, and Zenith-3 promised to do what they could to earn diplomatic recognition of the Rheezok. They would also try to find them a more suitable home-world, their own having been destroyed by the Ice Queen.

From Tabasco, they moved on to Veracruz, where the Aztec Empire (or an unreasonable facsimile) had been reborn, and where they were tasked with finding and arresting a bandit and anyone helping him. This proved a lot easier than they expected.

In Leon, Christianity was dominant, but the King was civilized and quite reasonable. He asked for an hour’s honest labor at reconstructing a temple that had been devastated in Ragnarok; because magic would be used to verify if they had truly worked as hard as they could, Zenith-3 were able to completely restore it, both inside and out, in the hour.

That earned them permission to continue on to the Republic of Coahuila, a steampunk society, where they caught the train to the capital. After an encounter with the King’s Oracle which the team are still assimilating, President daSilva tasked them with delivering some experimental parts to a laboratory. This took them hundreds of miles out of their way, but it gave the President the political cover that he needed to place his fastest transportation at their disposal, and that more than made up the difference.

Dr Esperanza had an intriguing take on a practical near-perpetual energy generator that gave Maynor kittens, but which had the potential to solve some of the most difficult global problems. She saw only the potential, he saw only the dangers. Both were probably right.

Morales was, shortly thereafter, proven to be right about the risks, as a Mana explosion at the laboratory threatened to extinguish all life on Earth. The team not only survived their proximity to the explosion, but were able to undo the disaster (with help from the Rheezok), conduct rescue efforts that saved many of the local townspeople until help arrived, then rescue Dr Esperanza, who had been killed in the cataclysm, all while costing themselves only about eight minutes lost time, thanks to some clever twists on standard time travel.

At the border, Maynor got them across in a hired vehicle, setting them down on the streets of Laredo, Texas. Near exhaustion, the team then time-traveled back into late May using some of the new tricks Maynor had taught them, and began planning and equipping themselves to establish a new Base.

The group’s finances were a problem; intended by UNTIL to last them a week at most, the team now had to stretch them over more than a month, and that meant that they were just about broke. To solve that problem, St Barbara took Runeweaver on a high-speed low-altitude flight to the Bahamas, where they accessed funds from their accumulated UNTIL salaries, which they rarely touched.

This enabled the team to buy two excellent second-hand cars – a red Ford Cavalier and a White Lincoln – and completely rejuvenated them with a comprehensive service. Zantar used his military logistics training and an unsuspected instinct for interesting destinations to plan the team’s explorations of Arkansas, while Union Jack took charge of the budget.

To help conceal their identities, it was decided that Basalt would take command of Team Shadow (who have the working public name of The Alliance, a name with which none of the members are satisfied), with Union Jack his second-in-command. Since Jack was to join Zeitgeist in the Lincoln and Basalt was to be the primary driver in the Cavalier with Zantar and Specter, this placed one member of the team’s hierarchy in each vessel, permitting them to split up and cover more ground.

Filled with camping gear and other potentially handy items, they formed a caravan to their overnight halt near the Texas border, where the two groups were to separate the next day. This enabled them to shake down and tweak their procedures, to everyone’s satisfaction. They camped overnight at Dalby Springs, now a ghost town (with a still-functional church), a hunting club, and a cemetery supposedly haunted by a Vampire.

They weren’t troubled by that possibly-mythic figure, but did have problems with giant Leeches cohabiting their sleeping bags, and Zeitgeist found an Owl with psychometric abilities; she decided to increase its intelligence and make it a pet. This refugee from Earth-Mandarin was already on the verge of sentience, and chose the name “Exeter” after careful consideration. By day he sleeps, in the late afternoon or evening he finds his way to the White Lincoln, and by night, he hunts. Zeitgeist has found the culture and etiquette of owls to be almost as complicated as that of humans.

The next morning, the teams split up to explore Arkansas, looking for any potential bases. None of them had any faith in UNTIL’s assertion that two or three days searching in any state they cared to nominate (from a provided short list) would find something that was good enough to do the job.

All of this is old news to anyone who’s been reading this series from the beginning, but it was aimed at reorienting the players in the big picture. It’s at this point that ‘new’ material started to appear:

Team One, in the Cavalier, took back roads to Texarcana, and then headed south. Team Two, in the Lincoln, traveled through Texarcana on the Interstate and a little ways East before turning north and west.

Team One hadn’t even left Texas – they were flying down the dirt roads between Maud and Redwater – when they spotted a Centaur wearing a torn flannel shirt and a cowboy-style jacket, a quiver on his back and a bow in hand. Rather than interrupt whatever he was doing, the Cavalier kept going, but observed that this promised to be a very unusual road trip.

Team two were the first to strike pay-dirt, though – Etheridge House in the city of Hope was on the market and large enough for the team (just barely). But it, and the city around it, were just barely adequate in so many ways that it was almost completely discounted as a contender. You were convinced that you could and would do better. More importantly, it started the teams developing a methodology for assessing potential bases.

Team one then found a couple of barely-passable choices that weren’t on the market, in the town of Fouke, which led to the first policy decision by Basalt – unless there was no other choice, the team would NOT drive people out of their homes either through acts of intimidation or psionic influence.

It was when they reached Mineral Springs that Team two found a more serious option: The Luna Hotel was a cheap provider of accommodations in the town until a rival, the Original Springs, opened about a block away. There wasn’t enough clientele to support two such operations, and the Luna lost badly to the more modern, more stylish, newcomer. But there were some serious drawbacks – this was a very religious community and the Luna was in a prominent location that would attract interest. But it was cheap, and it made it onto the list accordingly.

Team One made their own find a little while later, in the city of Waldo. On the way out of town, they found a very attractive little bed-and-breakfast. On inquiring, though, they found that it was thriving and not for sale.

Team two had the right to feel smug when they went two-nil up over the group in the Cavalier. In Ashdown, they found two homes for sale side-by-side, each large enough for three or four people easily, with a covered walkway connecting the pair. These were a genuine contender, right on lunchtime.

Team One started making up ground when they explored Magnolia. This was a tourist town whose population swelled five-fold during their festival season – 40,000 curious pairs of eyes looking everywhere for the next point of interest. The rest of the time, the population was too small to hide much activity, and too large not to have their own sets of curious eyes. There are a lot of properties with a significant accommodation capacity, and a percentage of those would always be on the market, but there were so many security problems that the team weren’t satisfied. Nevertheless, in aggregate, they were a viable candidate.

In Mount Holly, they struck out again, finding a perfect ten-bedroom mansion that had been sold just last week. In fact, it took them until they reached Camden to uncover anything really suitable. In that city, they discovered that the Comfort Inn Hotel was up for sale. Still in operation, the notion of a consortium of unlikely investors coming together to buy such a property makes enough sense that the eclectic nature of who you are supposed to be would become an asset to the cover story. And, of course, you don’t care whether or not the hotel makes a profit or a loss; you keep the existing staff on, maybe raising salaries a little to buy instant loyalty, and simply reserve a room each as “owners’ suites” from which you can come and go as you see fit. The only problem is that at 75 rooms, this might be a bit big even for UNTIL to swallow. But even with those caveats, it has to be a serious contender.

It then occurred to Team One that this is the worst possible time to be trying to acquire something that can pass as a base. The political situation is such that the economy has largely recovered, and one way or the other, the US will be re-entering the international community. As a result, optimism is incredibly high amongst investors, pushing the price up and persuading many that might otherwise be selling that their investments are about to pay off, no matter which party wins the election. Still, that only made things harder, not impossible!

As the teams continued to uncover reasons for optimism without actual results; both became convinced that it was just a matter of time, a far cry from their initial pessimism. Maybe UNTIL had known what they were talking about, after all.

The community of Horatio, when scrutinized by Team 2, made another important contribution to the project by adding a new criterion to the list: low Klan activity. If they don’t welcome blacks, how might they feel about Rock-men and Giant Cat-people? Not to mention the perpetual pushing of buttons on half the team. At best, it might be tempting fate. Many of the shops downtown were adorned with discrete Klan symbols, and so were a number of the vehicles – many of whom were being driven by Hispanics. There has always been tension between the Latin populations and the Blacks in the USNA – it started looking like the KKK may have found a way to exploit that to bolster their numbers. It also puts a potential new spin on the crisis that this mission is ultimately intended to confront and overcome.

As we rejoin play, Team one is en route to the town of Louanne after departing Camden, while Team two have left DeQueen and are heading to Lockesburg. It’s the latter – Nightshade, Zeitgeist, and Union Jack – who we will join first, as the Great Arkansas Road Trip resumes.

Synopsis, Session 22 (from Session 23)

And this is where the campaign is up to – tomorrow, as I write this, I have to generate the synopsis for session 23 of this adventure, describing what happened the last time we played. Here’s what I came up with:

Zenith-3, operating as Team Shadow, have split into two teams and started searching Arkansas for possible bases of operation.

This sets aside all questions of “why are we doing this” to get right to the current activities – which means that the ‘why’ was not particularly relevant to the day’s play in session 23. It has to be remembered at all times that these synopses aren’t intended to document fully what happened, they are aimed at preparing the players for the session ahead.

Team One consists of Basalt, Zantar, and Specter. So far, they have explored Texarkana, Fouke, Bradley, Lewisville, Stamps, Waldo, Magnolia, Mt Holly, Stephens, Camden, Louann, Smackover, El Dorado, Strong, and Crossett.

Team Two contains Zeitgeist, Nightshade, Union Jack, and occasionally, Exeter the Owl. They’ve explored Honan, Fulton, Hope, Columbus, Saratoga, Tollette, Mineral Springs, Ben Lomond, Waldo, Wilton, Ashdown, Magnolia, Foreman, Horatio, and De Queen.

Despite early expectations, both teams have encountered success.

Team Two have four potential locations to their credit:

• Etheridge House in Hope (02-202d),
• the Luna Hotel in Mineral Springs (03-203c),
• a Barn in Wilton (05-203c),
• and a double house in Ashdown (05-204L).

But, despite a slow start, Team One have eclypsed that.

• In Magnolia, they found so many hotels that some were surely on the market at any given time – but only counted that as one ‘find’ (06-103b)
• – and later, the Camden Comfort Inn Hotel (07-106j).
• Then, in El Dorado, there was a former Bed & Breakfast (08-108c),
• and the Rialto Movie Theater (08-108d).
• And in Crossett, there were two large houses – this one (10-109h)
• and this one (10-109i),
• both with 7 bedrooms, and the Old Rose Inn (10-109j),
• and the Hotel Crossett (10-109k).

I hope you’re keeping track of the potential bases you’ve found and what ratings you’ve assigned to them! If not, let’s pause now and get your notes up to date.

Blair, you were keeping track of Team Two’s finds….
(interact, refresh memories – some notes from the previous synopsis [p113, main]) might help.

Saxon, you were taking notes for Team One….
[as above]

As I expected, Saxon (Basalt’s player) had no problem laying his hands on his notes, though he hadn’t cottoned on to the image codes – which I’ve left intact in the examples above – being used as the index to let me quickly find the specifics of each potential base. (In fact, the only redactions from the synopsis being presented here are directions to me about changing from one folder of images to another).

Also as expected, Blair (Nightshade’s player) was completely unable to locate the list that he had been keeping. This was because while Saxon kept all his notes in one plastic sleeve, Blair’s had been on loose sheets of paper kept with his character – which he had just transposed into a binder, so this problem is not expected to recur.

But it did cost us a little playing time while the notes were re-made and old soup rehashed. This problem would only have been made worse with delays, though, so better it happen now…

Okay, where were we? Oh yes.

Part of the disparity in finds stems from the fact that Team Two’s route has taken them right up to the border with Oklahoma, which is entirely too close to the Zone Red deduced by Union Jack. Klan influence is strong in many of these communities, and seems to have infiltrated the Latino community, a matter that is likely to be of future concern.

But, mostly, it’s because Team 1 have fewer targets but more =big= targets.

But that’s far from all that you’ve found. Both teams have stumbled over several species of non-human that, one way or another, appear to have insinuated themselves into the local ecology and environment. Some have found niches for themselves in the local society, such as the Koblids who have indentured themselves to the farmers around Center Point, the Centaurs who occupy the wilderness in eastern Texas, Exeter of course, on top of the humans who simply joined in and made themselves at home in the wake of Ragnarok.

There are decisions that have been made along the way about the process that you’re using to prune the lists of potential bases down to manageable numbers at the end of each day, but I’ll remind you of those when they become relevant.

You each left your campsite at 6:12 AM this morning. We last visited Team One at 3:02 PM, local time, some four =hours= and one minute ahead of schedule; their fuel tank was reading a little over 1/2 full, so they probably had about 220 miles of range. Zantar is currently trying to learn how to drive the Red Cavalier, with moderate success.

Team Two last held the spotlight some time before that, at 1:26, when they were more than 2 1/2 hours ahead of schedule, with a fuel tank 3/4 full, giving them a range of almost 300 miles before they need to refuel. Nightshade is currently doing the driving.

Which means we’re probably overdue for looking into the White Lincoln, so why don’t we start there….

This employs maximum compression – entire incidents of game play have been reduced to a single place-name in a list. That gives the false impression that those explorations were, outside of the few that contained incidents or potential bases, unimportant. Even the players picked up on this point, so it should be expanded on at this point.

Decades of American TV shows and movies have created the impression of Arkansas and the ‘deep south’ in general being the desolation frequently shown in the westerns. This is because they were mostly filmed in and around Los Angeles and the relative deserts of California. In other words, a lot of people think that the south is like Nevada.

Even Dallas didn’t do a lot to dispel this impression – that it was all too dry, only flourishing when an environment could be artificially maintained.

Nonononono!

To some extent, to be fair, this is also a projection of the environment the players are most familiar with – that of Australia. I don’t think it would be a problem to the same extent with American players, even if they were all from the East Coast and had never visited out west.

But it was an impression that had to be dispelled and replaced with a truer impression of what the state was like, environmentally.

The same is true of the history and society and general impressions of the population and a whole slew of other factors.

When the PCs first arrived in Arkansas, I read to them selected passages from the “Guidebook” to the state that I had compiled as their guide to the state. This represented my opening salvo in countering many of these myths and misconceptions.

(I could just quote the relevant passages here, but I think that it might be more useful to quote the whole thing. I’ll give it a different background so that skimmers don’t think it’s a continuation of the synopsis. I’ll also inset it to further set it off from the main body of text).

Apologies to anyone who feels that any of the material that follows disparages or misrepresents their state or community.

Arkansas was first inhabited by bluff-dwellers 10,000 years ago, and detractors sometimes claim that it hasn’t progressed since. It held the first permanent settlement in the Mississippi Valley, which made the region a cornerstone of the Louisiana Purchase negotiations. It is often forgotten that the French ceded the territory to the Spanish in 1782, only for them to take it back in 1800, and sell it to the US in 1803.

Arkansas is not fully part of the deep south, and is cut off geographically from the Midwest, forcing it to chart it’s own course, flirting with both and with its own pigheaded politics, to boot.

Arkansas can generally be split into two halves – the highlands to the northwest and the lowlands of the southeast, but this is an oversimplification. In reality Arkansas is 5 different states in one – mountains, hilly areas, eastern Arkansas flatlands and the swamps of the Delta, and western dry spots. Each has its own personality.

The southeastern part of Arkansas along the Mississippi is sometimes called the Arkansas Delta. This region is a flat landscape of rich soils formed by repeated flooding.

Farther from the river, in the southeastern part of the state, the Grand Prairie has a more undulating landscape. Both this and the Delta are fertile agricultural areas. The Delta region is bisected by a geological formation known as Crowley’s Ridge, a narrow band of rolling hills. Many of the state’s largest settlements are atop the Ridge. The largest city in this region is Jonesboro.

The biggest city in the state is Little Rock, in the almost-exact center of the state. It has been the capital city since 1821 when it replaced Arkansas Post as the capital of the Territory of Arkansas. The state capitol was moved to Hot Springs and later Washington (not the one in DC) during the Civil War when the Union armies threatened the city in 1862, and state government did not return to Little Rock until after the war ended.

Northwest Arkansas is part of the Ozark Plateau. This region is split by the Arkansas River; natives of this part of Arkansas refer to the southern and eastern parts as The Lowlands (but they don’t refer to the rest as the Highlands, go figure). The Ozark and Ouchita Mountains are in this area to the west. The state’s highest peak is Mount Magazine which is 2753 feet above sea level. The Northwest is a major population, education, and economic center. Western Arkansas has many caves.

The Crater of Diamonds State Park near Murfreesboro is the world’s only diamond-bearing site accessible to the public for digging.

The west of Arkansas is timberlands both in the center and to the south, densely forested with numerous small, isolated communities. The biggest city in the southeast is Pine Bluff.

Prior to the Civil War, Timber was the major industry, and it has experienced periodic resurgences since. The number two industry (and taking over the number one spot whenever Timber falls short) is cotton, generally operated plantation style.

After the civil war, reliance on the plantation economy suffered as cotton prices declined rapidly. Because they didn’t diversify until it was too late, the state became an economic backwater.

The Southeast has wheat in the number three slot, other regions have mining, tourism, or other industries.

White rural interests dominate Arkansas politics through the disenfranchisement of African Americans. This practice and the most blatant gerrymandering were overturned during the civil rights reformation but more subtle techniques have been adopted in the wake of Ragnarok to once again put white interests first.

Arkansas finally began to diversify its economy post WW2.

Arkansas is home to a dozen Wilderness Areas, which have been set aside for outdoor recreation and are open to hunting, fishing, hiking, and primitive camping. No mechanized vehicles nor developed campgrounds are allowed in most of these areas.

Southern Arkansas, especially in the East, is still close enough to the Gulf Of Mexico that this body of water is major influence over the state’s weather. Generally, Arkansas, has hot, humid summers and slightly drier, mild to cool winters. Snowfall is infrequent but most common in the northern half of the state. The half of the state south of Little Rock is more apt to see ice storms. Arkansas is known for extreme weather and frequent storms. A typical year brings thunderstorms, tornadoes, hail, snow and ice storms. Between both the Great Plains and the Gulf States, Arkansas, receives around 60 days of thunderstorms. Arkansas is located in Tornado Alley, and as a result, a few of the most destructive tornadoes in US history have struck the state. While sufficiently far from the coast to avoid a direct hit from a hurricane, Arkansas can often get the remnants of a tropical system, which dumps tremendous amounts of rain in a short time and often spawns smaller tornadoes.

The state has eight cities with populations above 50,000. In descending order of size, they are Little Rock, Fort Smith, Fayetteville, Springdale, Jonesboro, North Little Rock, Conway, and Rogers. Of these, only Fort Smith and Jonesboro are outside the two largest metropolitan zones.

Arkansas first designated a state highway system in 1924, and first numbered its roads in 1926. Arkansas had one of the first paved roads in the country, the Dollarway Road, and was one of the first members of the Interstate Highway System. The political investment in the highway system came at the expense of other modes of transport, and even today, more than 90% of the state’s food and good distribution is by road, with rail, river-based shipping, and air sharing the rest.

Any area with a central government that has had more than 1000 citizens at some point in its history is considered a city; without a central government, these are called “unincorporated communities”, which are administered by a central authority that is not part of that community (but is usually nearby). Several unincorporated communities and zero or more cities may form a township. Multiple townships and/or cities aggregate to form a county, which provides overall administration for the region. One community is designated the county seat, where offices and administration for that county are located. The lowest level criminal courts are the county courts, and most counties maintain some sort of prison.

The state has developed a definite culture of its own, embodied in the military and in native entertainers like Johnny Cash, Charlie Rich, Jimmy Driftwood and Glen Campbell – from rusty as nails to eastern sophistication, all atop a country veneer. 70% of the population are Protestant, and religion – like country music – is taken seriously – more-so in some places than others. The culture of Arkansas includes distinct cuisine, dialect, and traditional festivals.

Sports are VERY important to the culture, ranging from football, baseball, and basketball to hunting and fishing. If there are no professional league teams based locally, the citizens will look for lesser teams (working down to the high school level) to support – VERY vocally.

Participating in some sort of sport or recreation is considered essential by the majority of citizens and anyone who doesn’t take part in such will find themselves viewed as strange outsiders.

Arkansas features a variety of native music across the state, ranging from the blues heritage of West Memphis, Pine Bluff, Helena–West Helena to rockabilly, bluegrass, and folk music from the Ozarks.

Perhaps the best-known piece of Arkansas’s culture is the stereotype of its citizens as shiftless hillbillies. This reputation began when the state was characterized by early explorers as a savage wilderness full of outlaws and thieves. Just as Australians are proud of their convict heritage, so citizens of Arkansas are prone to revel in this reputation and even play up to it for the benefit of strangers. This has led to many tales in which an Arkansas native has taken a ‘city slicker’ to the cleaners while making the stranger think that he was the one doing the swindling. Arkansas natives generally won’t instigate such activities but are more than happy to take up the challenge.

Despite its hillbilly reputation, Arkansas has elected only three Republicans to the US. Senate since Reconstruction (i.e. Post the civil war). And yet, reflecting the state’s large evangelical population, the state has a strong socially-conservative bent, which often leads to the election of Republican-dominated lesser offices.

Some say that Arkansas feels like a soviet-block country, because of the abject poverty, willful incompetence, good-ole-boy corrupt politicians and government, illiteracy, deplorable infrastructure, appalling lack of work ethic, incivility, etc.

News services that do reports on the best and worst states to live in consistently rate Arkansas as one of the worst states in the United States, if not the absolute worst.

Of course, given the build-up, and current levels of awareness of distortions arising from slanted media coverage, the players would be left hesitant to accept the characterizations offered in the last two paragraphs as gospel, too. In fact, the response at the time was ‘We’ll just have to see for ourselves.”

A number of the early towns visited also reinforced this theme as the ‘locals’ were visibly and clearly playing up to the stereotypes for the benefit of tourists. But the negatives were also immediately shown to have some basis in reality:

As you drive from Texas into Arkansas, you immediately notice a deterioration in the quality of the highway. The interstates here are much more poorly constructed and poorly maintained than in Texas. For example, there is not much shoulder, making it dangerous to pull over on the side of the road – but this doesn’t stop native Arkansans from frequently doing so and abandoning cars on the sides of highways. Since there is no state inspection of vehicles for road-worthiness (unlike Texas), there are many cars on the roads in a shockingly-maintained condition that is hazardous to both their drivers AND those unfortunate enough to be driving next to them.

There is little or no gradient built into highways, or any other roads, on turns, making it difficult to stay in your lane and dangerous. There is little or no reflective material in the paint making lines difficult to see at night or in the rain.

Additionally, you share the road with an inordinate number of large trucks. There’s a traffic jam on the I-30 at least once a week. That’s when you discover that every second vehicle is an 18-wheeler. The reason for this inordinate barrage of trucks is that there are very few rail lines in the state and most things coming into and out of Arkansas must be shipped by truck on the few available roads.

This heavy traffic combines with the general poverty of the state to leave the roads and highways in a constant state of disrepair from overuse. There are still section of road where the effects of Ragnarok are visible (and other forms of infrastructure are also affected in some communities).

Once you get off the interstate, infrastructure becomes exponentially worse, something that is usually attributed to a lack of standards or even firm guidelines. Almost every parking lot, for example, seems designed to facilitate traffic accidents.

Many drivers & vehicles are uninsured (if not uninsurable), and the combination makes insurance more expensive in Arkansans than anywhere else in the US. There seems to be a complete inability in the population to use turn signals, but this might be due to the incompetence and laziness of driving inspectors instead of failure of those vehicle components; ANYONE can get a license in Arkansas if they want one, no driving test required. The same is true of any skill or occupation. Want an electrical license? Fill out the right form, send it in with the right license fee, and wait. There are two exceptions: the Arkansas Bar requires an appropriate period of legal study (but not graduation), and MDs, likewise; and surgeons need to meet national licensing standards.

Consequently, incompetence is the norm – in almost everything. If you go to a fast food restaurant and order a basic combo (fries, drink, sandwich), nothing extra or extravagant, there is a seventy percent chance they’ll get your order wrong – forget your fries, or put the wrong sandwich in your bag, or not give you any ketchup although you asked for it – or they will overcharge you, or give you the wrong amount of change. This problem is pretty much ubiquitous for every type of service in the state, e.g. auto maintenance, healthcare, telephone or cable TV service, plumbing, etc.

There are innumerable gas stations and convenient stores throughout the southern part of the state which range from very untidy to disgustingly filthy. It’s rare for anyone other than the owner (and often not them, either) to have sufficient work ethic to clean ANY store or business regularly.

Many people will tell you the cost of living here is low, which is at best only half true. In general, rural areas are less expensive than urban areas. Arkansas is a sparsely populated, very rural state. Dallas-Fort Worth in Texas ALONE has almost TWICE the population of the ENTIRE state. When you look closely, however, you find the only thing that’s really less expensive is housing and rent, because there’s much less demand. Pretty much everything else is MORE expensive. For example, Food will cost about $30 a week more PER PERSON than in Louisiana, Oklahoma, or Texas.

Locals like to gossip, and will happily relate personal stories. “An older, affable man in his mid-forties told [the guidebook author] of his twenty-five children – at least, those were the ones he knew about. He noticed the look of surprise in my face and quickly put my astonishment to rest, “Course, they ain’t all with the same woman.” Half jokingly, I asked, “Do you know all their names?” “Naw, I can’t be bothered with any’a that,” he replied, not in the least nonplussed. “It must be hard supporting that many kids,” I offered. “Well, I used ta work three jobs tryin’ ta pay all the child support, but that was wearing muhself plumb out. Now I mostly just git muh pay’n cash, so I don’t have ta bother with none’a that. I figure if them there women wuz dumb enough to have kids with me, the government can help pay for them, ‘cuz they like payin’ fer no-hopers.” But he may have been playing up to the stereotype for my [benefit. You can’t tell.’

The Ozarks are absolutely gorgeous and buffalo river is a place deserving of fairy tales.

A woman who spoke [to the guidebook author] reported stopping for gas in the west of the state: the attendants told her to “get out, they didn’t serve my kind there”. Surprised and confused, she asked “what was my kind?” And they answered something about her being a harlot because she was wearing red shoes. This happened to be a time where she was wearing running shoes.

The state is rife with blatant KKK ties – look for signs on every 2-mile marker (the state govt won’t let them have the first mile marker). The state headquarters is in a town named Zinc.

Family roots run deep, and there is still a bit of mistrust of outsiders. It’s one of those places where someone who moved in 30 years ago is still an outsider, who may be treated politely, but is not quite accepted as a local.

Locals will tell you that Arkansas has the best BBQ in the world – not Texas, not Tennessee. Jones Barbecue, out in the middle of nowhere in an old shack that has been there for years making BBQ the same way, is a national prize winner. Fayetteville has an annual festival, Bikes, Blues, and Barbecue. Arkansas claims to be the home of cheese dip – a claim that’s contested, but the annual cheese dip contest is a serious competition in these parts.

The food is great although it is often greasy, and meals can consist of nothing but fried items; even the vegetables are fried.

Arkansas is a great example of southern hospitality, hugs from everyone and they treat you like family immediately.Be prepared to hear, ‘Y’all come back now!’ repeatedly – whether they want you back or not.

All this operated to begin breaking down the biases, myths, and misconceptions embedded within the players awareness’s, enabling a richer and broader perspective to take their place. Arkansas is, at least in the game reality (and, I suspect, in real life) a far more complex place to live than the cartoonish stereotypes would have you believe; a state with its problems (some of its own making, some not) but with its positives and advantages, too.

The overall impression left by the first couple of sessions was that Arkansas had been gifted several opportunities to escape the stereotyped image – mineral booms, oil booms, timber booms, railroad booms – and had managed, one way or another, to squander all of them, usually through a ‘live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself’ attitude. If that money had been invested in a more prosperous future, anticipating that the gravy train would not last forever, it would not now be so economically distressed, and the brain drain vicious cycle would not be operating to condemn it to more of the same.

You could sum all this up by saying that I had to make game-Arkansas feel like a “real place” to the players. Only once I had done that could potential bases of operation be properly assessed. And, even after that impression had been created, I still needed to ‘lock it in” so that it would not be forgotten. I suspect that I will need to visit this topic in the next synopsis since it will be delivered in the first session of the new year – in late January.

The missing parts of the story

The degree of compression in the synopsis skips over this step-by-step, brick-by-brick construction of a more rounded impression of the state. I didn’t want this to be a superficial intellectual reappraisal,. I wanted to embed it as bedrock in the players’ minds, just as I would any other location that was going to be recurring touchstone within the campaign (once that’s been done, I can spend less time doing that and more time on encounters and other interesting events and discoveries).

[The problem is that I had no idea, working in advance, how long it was going to take. I think the job is now largely done, but I allocated almost all of “day one” in-game to the purpose – and we still have at least one full game session left in that game period.]

To close out this article, then, I thought that I would transcribe into this post the actual pre-play adventure notes for both the session so comprehensively compressed and the one just played. Once again, to help distinguish them, I’ll use different background colors.

This will completely unedited – all image references will be left intact, etc – exactly what I ran the game sessions from. Of course, if I have any observations to make along the way, I’ll interrupt myself as usual.

Prepared Material for Session 22

Starting right away with an observation: I didn’t know how much of this material we would get through in a game session when I wrote it, so it was more or less one continuous stream that could be interrupted at the end of any location’s evaluation. After the first couple of sessions, I did word counts of how much material we had gotten through, and that gave an accurate guide to session 22, but overestimated progress in session 23. Oh well, it was just a guideline, anyway.

For the record (starting as the teams leave Texas behind, and ignoring synopses because their length is subject to other factors):

• Game Session 20: 8,952 words
• Game Session 21: 11,198 words
• Game Session 22: 11,083 words
• Game Session 23: 9, 649 words
• Game Session 24 (not yet played): 9,491 words
• Game Session 25 (not yet played): 5,004 words
• “Day One” Total: 55,377 words + synopses

[Session 24 has slightly more roleplay with NPCs than previous sessions, so the players will be providing more of the ‘words’. Session 25 has a LOT more roleplay between PCs so they will be providing a LOT more of the ‘words’. Plus it has more encounters, transitioning to Day 2].

You will notice that the final format of the content, described earlier, has not yet evolved.

Final note before I get started: I’ll be doing my best to make the presentation below look like it does in my actual working document, including using extra blank lines as separators – but if that doesn’t work, I’ll edit for clarity first and fidelity second.

Synopsis p113, main document

No that’s not a typo.

208 Lockesburg 11+48 AM to 12+2 PM [Major Eval]

Six minutes after Team One exit Camden, Team two reach their next target, the town of Lockesburg. It’s a little more removed from the border and “Zone Red”, and almost half-way *back* to Mineral Springs by virtue of the zigzag route mapped out by Defender.

Lockesburg is a 3.5 square mile city containing about 610 residents in about 300 households. The median age is 31, and 19% of the population are below the poverty line.

The city was once a center for local business and trade and served as the county seat for 36 years. It lost much of its importance when it was bypassed by the railroad in the late nineteenth century and suffered a second blow when that led to the loss of status as the county seat in the early 20th century. Surrounded by productive farm land, this is a typical rural township, Arkansas style.

Lockesburg wasn’t intended to be the county seat, anyhow; the original seat was Paraclifta, which was centrally located – until part of the county was separated off to become Little River County. Paraclifta was no longer central, and opportunists saw possibilities. The Locke brothers, founders of Lockesburg, and owners of much of the land around the then-tiny community, were amongst them, and offered 120 acres of land to expand the township and house county facilities. Their rival opportunists in the town of Royal Appleton only offered half as much – so the Lockes won. They contracted for the construction of a courthouse and the jail for $12,400, a sum they expected to recoup more than 10-fold. The construction ran over time and over budget and eventually came in at double the contracted amount, and even then, the builders had cut corners.

The county jail they built had an especially chequered history. It was built on the cheap in 1869-70, heard its first case in 1871, fell down in 1883, was replaced with a new building in 1884, burned down in 1887, and was replaced a second time in 1888 – only to lose relevance in 1905 when the town lost its standing.

But in the short term, the town prospered, and many people abandoned Paraclifta to move here, dismantling and relocating entire buildings on the back of horse-drawn wagons. In 1870, Lockesburg got it’s post office; by this time, William Locke was mayor and his brother Matthew was postmaster – this in addition to income from their local farm holdings and the commercial operations they had set up and owned. The whole set-up was positively feudal in mode, and feudal societies always attract religions.

The Masons were the first, opening a hall in the same year as the first hotel in the town; they were soon followed by the Methodists, Cumberland Presbyterians, and Baptists. By 1890 there were three general stores, a millinery, three blacksmiths, a shoe shop, a drugstore, three doctors, and a popular hotel – which was operated by another member of the Locke family, John, and his wife.

it was around 1897 that the Locke family made the fatal blunder that ultimately undid their entire burgeoning dynastic empire. The Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Gulf Railroad (which eventually became the Kansas City Southern Railway) was seeking a route through the area en route to Texas and the Gulf, and as the largest, most prosperous town in the region, they were heading for Lockesburg as their first choice, but too many locals were unwilling to sell a right-of-way to the railway company.

It is rumored that the clan Patriarch, William, thought that the railroad would return with a better offer. They didn’t; instead they routed the line about 15 miles to the northwest, through what would become De Queen, and prosperity – and families – began to migrate there. In less than a decade, De Queen was the county seat and prospering, while Lockesburg was not, and decaying. To their credit, the Lockes were able to keep the population relatively stable, but the value and the businesses went elsewhere – even those owned by members of the Locke family.

In 1972, the fossilized bones of the hind foot of an unclassified dinosaur were discovered in a shallow pit on the land of local resident Joe B. Friday. A professor at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) gave the bones the informal name Arkansaurus Fridayi. To date, they are the only dinosaur bones uncovered in Arkansas – but that doesn’t stop out-of-state dinosaur hunters from searching the area for fame and fortune on a regular basis.

Today Lockesburg is the home of more than 30 businesses, including two banks. Visitors are attracted to the area by whitewater rafting at the nearby Cossatot River State Park-Natural Area. Approximately 14 miles south of the city is the 30,000-acre Pond Creek National Wildlife Refuge, which is home to many species of migratory birds. The Refuge is also available for many outdoor activities, including fishing, hunting, and wildlife observation.

Some have described Lockesburg as the town which wouldn’t die, and De Queen residents sometimes refer to it as “Methusela-burg”. Locals claim that their neighboring community was named “De Queen” as the outcome of a revenge-motivated plot by William, but not only is there no evidence of this, and there is no readily-perceived opportunity for him to have done so, and his character was not reputed to be a spiteful one; on the contrary, he was fair and even-handed but ambitious; principled, and a touch greedy.

The citizens of modern Lockesburg have taken this character to heart and made it their own; almost every business in town has a sign, “we dicker” (or equivalent), and citizens =hustle= to pull in passing travelers.

EVALUATION:
Lockesburg looks big enough on the map (07-208a)

…to be interesting, and the history suggests that there might be a lot of vacant properties for sale, so it’s easy to see why it has been targeted in your search for a base. But when you cross into the city limits, there’s no sign of a settlement in sight.

In fact, before you see any urbanization at all, you pass farms, farmhouses, fields, barns, sheds, and haystacks. These then give way to a leafy park on the right, and a truck stop to the left – one without the diner you thought obligatory. After the truck-stop, there’s a looping road to the left that rejoins the highway a little further on with no other signs of habitation (07-208b).

You knew that you were approaching the town the back way, but this seems ridiculous! It’s only when you approach the crossroads in the center of town that urban development becomes visible (07-208c).

That’s when you realize that the (greedy) Locke brothers’ descendants must still own most of the land alongside the highway, so townspeople would have to have taken up residence further back – and the main street of Lockesburg isn’t in fact the road named “Main Street”, it’s the one that runs at right angles to it. Everything you had seen as empty may once have contained houses – but the houses went away with their owners, long ago. In some cases the land was reclaimed for farming, in some cases it went back to nature, and in some cases, it’s kept ready for new citizens who might never come. (5 min)

Sure enough, turning to the North permits the real Lockesburg to begin to unfold, starting with the Gas Station (and the vintage car that has just been refilled while a hot-rod pickup waits patiently) (07-208d). (6 min)

In the distance looms the obligatory water tower (07-208e)… (7 min)

but it’s taller than most for some reason. Between you and the waterworks is a park, and the town visitor’s center (07-208f)… (8 min)

which is currently closed. Turning left at the Methodist Church (07-208g)…. (9 min)

…you enter a residential neighborhood and start looking for mansions and for-sale signs. There are a lot of empty lots, and most of the homes are inadequate to your needs (07-208h)… (12 min)

…but after you drive past the post office (07-208i)… (13 min)

…the houses begin to trend larger and better appointed (07-208j)…. (13 min)

…until you find yourself looking at something on the scale that you’re looking for. (07-208k) (15 Min)

VERDICT:
The sign on the letterbox – William Locke III – tells you that this particular example is unlikely to be up for sale anytime soon, and that the odds of finding anywhere else comparable within the town are slim to non-existent. Lockesburg is another dry well. Evaluating Lockesburg has taken 15 minutes.

Directions Take Highway 371 East 7 miles, turn left (watch for the exit) onto Route 26 and head NE 8 miles to Center Point.
     2.2 miles in urban settings @ 35 mph
     7 miles @ 55 mph
     8 miles @ 80 mph
     ETA Center Point 12+20 PM

T2: 5+54
     142 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: between 3/4 and full
     driver change in apr 5 m
     Sched stop in apr 2 hr 5 m

=================================================================

106 Louann 11+51 [Drive-through]

Team Two are approaching the turn onto the real main street of Lockesburg when Team 1 finally reach their next whistle-stop, the town of Louann, their trip slightly delayed by traffic. Currently, it is home to 285 individuals in 0.24 square miles – about 800m x 500m.

There’s a Fire Department, a church, and a post office packed into its ten streets – four running one way and six the other.

The racial makeup is 63% White, 36% Black, and 1% Hispanic. The median age is 38 and there are 90 men for every 100 women. 45% are in poverty including 66% of the region’s children.

There’s no real prospect of finding a new base here, but you never know your luck in the big city, and since you have to drive through the town anyway, this is another ‘drive-by’ evaluation.

Your first view of Louann is not promising (08-106a) –

In fact, you pass the city limits and travel almost half a mile before seeing any sign of community, and that’s a speed limit sign. About 100 yards later, you get your first view of the real Louann (08-106b).

There are basically a number of houses beside the road (08-106c)…

…and small side-roads leading to more houses (08-106d).

Before you know it, Louann is behind you. You saw nothing to suggest a surprise prospect.

In it’s own way, that’s encouraging. When Defender planned the research project that determined these routes and targets, and outlined the limited scope of what he thought was doable, there were obvious doubts that it would be enough – but Defender’s statement that the net being cast would be wide enough is borne out every time you pass through a location he =didn’t= target and don’t find anything, as predicted. And that gives growing confidence that when the schedule says there =might= be something, =and= it’s worth spending time looking for it, there really might be something, if you look hard enough and creatively enough.

Your fuel tank meter touches empty, but the “look for gas” light indicating that you are on your last 10% of range has not yet lit up. You don’t need to stop for fuel yet, but it’s time to start watching for the opportunity.

The distance between communities that you are used to has a profound impact on how people react to such things. In Australia and even New Zealand, communities are spaced far enough apart that it’s extremely dangerous to let a tank reach empty; you might still have 45-50 miles of fuel range, but the next fuel supply might be 60 miles away, or more. In the US, the same is true in the western desert regions, but anywhere else (including the California coast, the average gap between fuel points is 15 miles – and as many are substantially closer together than that. Europe is somewhere in between, with an average 25 miles between settlements.

Another consideration is that your car performs more efficiently at low fuel levels because you no longer need to accelerate and brake the weight of the fuel. The white Lincoln is too heavy for this effect to be very noticeable, but the cavalier is much lighter and smaller. This effect is far more pronounced in stop-start traffic, and at high speed, and you have both immediately in front of you. So it’s not just a more casual attitude toward low fuel, it’s also being fiscally responsible.

T1: 5+41
     199 min ahead of schedule
     AC: ON
     Fuel Tank: showing empty
     driver change in apr 20 m
     Sched stop in apr 2 hr 20 m

=================================================================

107 Smackover 11+55 AM to 12+1 PM [Major Eval]

Eight minutes after Team 2 reach Lockesburg, their eight target, Team 1 get to their 7th target, the town with the decidedly suggestive name of Smackover, about 160 miles away as the St Barbara flies. In fact, the ladies and Union Jack are looking at the (closed) visitor’s center as Basalt guides the Cavalier through the city limits.

Smackover is a small city in a region of southern Arkansas that resembles a sunken swamp interspersed with rolling hills and steep knolls. The name ‘Smackover Creek’ first appeared in a 1789 letter written by the commandant of Fort Miro to the French territorial governor – it sounds better in French, La Bayour de Chemin Couvert. The name of the settlement is possibly derived from the french ‘Chemin Couvert’ (meaning ‘covered way’) but later histories =written by the locals= attribute the name to an 18th century French description of the south-central areas of the area, “Sumac Couvert” meaning “covered with Sumac”, a reference to the dense growths of Sumac trees in the region.

By 1830, settlers with land grants had migrated to the area and an agrarian economy based on two large cotton plantations owned by the Saxon and Reeves families, and a host of minuscule other farms, had been established. A consequence was that slavery in the community was minimal.

Harsh economic conditions after the civil war took a huge toll; farms that had been in families for fifty tears were sold on the courthouse steps to the highest bidder. Many families who had been solvent ten years earlier were now destitute. By 1908, a large sawmill had opened and the owner had become convinced that oil could be found in the region. Few paid him any attention, but Sidney Albert Umstead went around buying land and leasing what wasn’t for sale, anyway. He invested everything that he owned in the search for oil.

On July 1, 1922, his wildcat well reached a depth of 2066 feet and a deep rumbling growl emerged from beneath the earth’s surface. The crew stepped away in fear, and so had a grand view when a thick column of black gold burst forth. Within 6 months, more than 1000 wells had been drilled, with a success rate of 92%, in an oil field occupying 68 square miles. The population of 90 had become 25,000.

Lawlessness was so rampant that, among the twenty-five petitioners on the incorporation document that officially created the city, none were willing to hold public office. Later that month, the town saw a multi-day riot.

Unfortunately, conservation laws to protect the environment were absent in Arkansas, and as a result, wells were allowed to “run wild” until the natural gas had been vented into the atmosphere. This practice eventually ruined the giant oil field, which could be compared to a punctured aerosol can that has half of its contents remaining but no remaining interior pressure to propel them out. The town’s population steadily declined as oil companies and their employees moved away to more lucrative finds in Texas and Oklahoma, and 12 major oil companies were replaced by about 100 independent operators, and by WW2, only four of those were left.

The war created a huge demand for petroleum and the oil field was the focus of renewed exploration and drilling. This discovered four new, untapped deposits which continue to deliver oil to this day, but the industry has none of the ‘robust vigor’ that was so prevalent 50-60 years ago. The landscape is scarred by oil and saltwater running freely over the earth and into its streams as a result of the unbridled quest for the black stuff.

Although the boom days are over, Smackover is still a viable community with a stable population. The petroleum industry still plays an important role in its economy with fifty percent of its population depending upon the oil industry. Smackover still hosts a four-day Oil Town Festival every June.

The main street still appears much as it did in the boom days, and a secondary tourism market is slowly developing. The Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources is located there. It is also home to 2600 people and has been experiencing a population boom over the past decade (+19% from 1970 to 1980). 73% of the residents are White, 26% are Black.

The oil boom brought about significant development of the community. There are long-established churches, five city parks, a nature trail, a country club, and unlimited boating, fishing, and hunting opportunities. The population, and all these fixtures, are concentrated into just 4.2 square miles.

The city is steeped in pure Americana; a street-mounted antique stop light is located in the center of town and Western-style store fronts line Main Street.

Median age is 39 years. 81 males to every 100 females. 15% live below the poverty line including 19 % of children; these are substantially better numbers than most of the neighboring communities.

The citizens of Smackover consider their school system to be the town’s most important asset, having noted the economic, social, and demographic collapses of other communities following amalgamation of their schools.

The city has hot, humid summers and mild to cool winters.

EVALUATION:
The place is an ecological disaster that could use a protracted visit by St Barbara once the political walls come down. But even that might be impractical, given the scale of the area that has been contaminated, and salt water doesn’t mix very well with her powers, anyway (08-107a). (1 min).

It’s fair to say that Smackover’s infrastructure was the best that money could buy – in the early 20th century. It’s getting on for 60 years old now, and while some of it has been well-maintained, most of it is showing signs of age and cost-cutting (08-107b).
(2 min)

While some buildings have obviously had care lavished on them, like this church (08-107c),
(3 min)

…and some of the homes are well-maintained (if not big enough for your needs) (08-107d),
(5 min)

…more are decaying shacks, now uninhabited (08-107e)…
(5 min)

…or (worse) run-down hovels of varying size that are still occupied (08-107f).
(6 min)

VERDICT: There is nothing of value for you here.

While determining this, your fuel warning light lit up, warning that you only had about 35 miles range left in the tank. One look at the prices being charged by the only surviving gas station in town convinced you that this was not something you should act on immediately! El Dorado is only about 10 miles away, and it is to be hoped that prices there are more reasonable. El Dorado will also be within 5 minutes or so of being half-way through your planned day, when you should think about changing drivers – if Basalt trusts either the unlicensed Specter or the inexperienced and overconfident Zantar to take the wheel! Even if he doesn’t, a few minutes rest break would be a good idea!

Directions: travel SE 7 miles on Route 7 and watch for the turnoff to the right, then 2.2 miles South into El Dorado. If you miss it, there’s another chance heading East 3 miles or so later.
     0.5 miles in urban settings @ 35 mph
     8 miles @ 85 mph
     ETA El Dorado 5+55

T1: 5+50
     220 min ahead of schedule
     AC: ON
     Fuel Tank: warning light illuminated.
     driver change in apr 10 m
     Sched stop in apr 2 hr 10 m

=================================================================

108 El Dorado 12+7 to 12+21 [Major Eval]

Team 2 are one minute past the Lockesburg City Limits on their way out of town when Team One reach the city named for a vision of paradise.

Located in the West Gulf Coastal Plain, which covers the southeastern and south central portions of the state along the border of Louisiana, this is a lowland area of Arkansas characterized by pine forests and farmlands. The city is 16.2 sq miles in land area and home to a population of more than 25,000 people. Natural resources include natural gas, petroleum deposits and beds of bromine flats.

El Dorado was at the heart of the 1920s oil boom in the state. During World War II, it became a center of the chemical industry, which still plays a part in the economy, as do oil and timber. To a lesser extent, it also suffers from the same problems as Smackover.

It experiences hot summers when high temperatures tend to be in the 90s °F, and cool during winter when high temperatures tend to be in the 50s. The warmest month of the year is July with an average maximum temperature of 92.7°F, while the coldest month of the year is January with an average minimum temperature of 32.9°F – 0.9° above Freezing. The drop in temperatures at night is 22-23 degrees F (12°C) all year round. Rainfall is fairly evenly distributed throughout the year.

El Dorado has two airports, one commercial and a small general aviation airport, both of which are owned by the city.

The population is 50% Black, 45% White, 1% Latino. Median age is 38, For every 100 females, there are 79 males. 25% of the population live below the poverty line, including 36% of children – so except for the racial profile, it is very ordinary demographically. Which stands to reason, given the size of the population.

The city offers many outdoor activities and parks for recreation including tennis courts, baseball and softball fields, golf courses, and walking trails. The city also contains a botanical state park. Memorial Stadium is a fully-equipped 6,000-seat football stadium and track, and home of the El Dorado Wildcats, the local college football team.

El Dorado has been a regional center for the performing arts for many years. The South Arkansas Arts Center, known locally as SAAC, is an independent community-supported nonprofit organization which operates a 22,500 square foot facility containing three visual art galleries, a ballet studio, a 207-seat theater, educational classroom space, and an open studio for local artists. They present eight to twelve contemporary performance events each year on stage and host rotating art exhibitions each year of national, regional and local significance in the Merkle, Price, and Lobby art galleries. El Dorado also has a number of annual events, with themes geared toward a wide range of target groups.

There are nine radio stations (7 using the FM band and 2 AM stations), and three television stations (one NBC affiliate, one local station, and a PBS station operated by the Arkansas Educational Television Network). The transmitters are all located East of El Dorado in Huttig. Other networks broadcast from nearby Shreveport.

EVALUATION:
Downtown looks clean and prosperous (08-108a). (3 min)

Entering the back streets of the city, you drive past numerous typical homes that are too small (08-108b)… (7 min).

…but you’ve grown used to these and ignore them, looking for the singular gem. And this time, you find one – a former bed and breakfast that looks newly-restored (08-108c). (9 min)

VERDICT:
Six bedrooms for guests and 2 for staff would afford plenty of capacity for the team and a couple of staff to care for the place when you aren’t in residence. This would leave zero capacity in reserve, however, and be likely to attract attention, so it isn’t the perfect solution. But it’s a definite contender, maybe a 3½ out of 5.

EVALUATION 2:
And, on the way out of town, a bonus, when you come across the rather dilapidated Rialto Movie Theater (08-108d). (12 min)

There are no for-sale signs, but equally, there’s no indication of repairs or even basic maintenance being carried out. A structure of this size would take months to renovate, and you could easily simply fake an attempt to do so. A fictitious architectural firm, some spurious blueprints to be submitted and rejected by the city authorities – the process could easily be held up for years. Meanwhile, you secretly subdivide the interior – two movie theaters and assorted other chambers – into accommodations and facilities. Your biggest problem would be utilities, since they have probably been disconnected and getting them put back on would be an improbable act – you would have to find ways of stealing the water, power, and drainage capacity that you would need. So, again, not perfect, but definite potential – probably also a 3½ out of 5. (14 min)

VERDICT cont:
Two distinctly different properties to put on the list, neither perfect – but perfection may be too much to ask. Besides, the plan isn’t to pick one right now, it’s to generate a short list that you prune as you go.

This gets you past the half-way mark of your planned first day by almost 10 minutes. Time for a rest break, refueling, and, if you have an alternate, to change drivers. Exxon have two outlets (one in a Rainbow Mart), Shell have two more, and Gulf and Marathon have one each. Right in the center of town is an independent station, but they are much more expensive than the other outlets you’ve seen. There are two actual fuel refineries within the city limits, and you reason that every additional mile that the fuel has to be trucked adds to the price, so your best price will probably be at the Marathon station. Sure enough, their price for Premium is just $3.06 a gallon, a good 40 cents cheaper than you’ve seen elsewhere in town, and half the price in Smackover. Refiling your tank costs $58.67. As you drive away, it’s 6 hrs and 14 min since you broke camp this morning.

Directions: travel South-East along Highway 82 to Strong and then East to Crossett.
     3 miles urban @35 mph
     17 miles @ 55 mph
     Strong ETA 6+50

     1 mile urban @35 mph
     24 miles @ 55 mpg
     6 miles urban to main CBD @ 35mph
     Crossett ETA 7+18

T1: 6+14
     242 min ahead of schedule
     AC: ON
     Fuel Tank: full
     Sched stop in apr 2 hrs
     Sched stop in apr 4 hrs
     Sched end of day in apr 5 h 45 m

=================================================================

Interrupting to explain that directions are given at Major Evaluations and include any drivethroughs that are to follow. So the above shows that from here, Team 1 are to head to their next major evaluation in Crossett with a drive-through in Strong.

209 Center Point 12+19 PM to 12+51 [Major Eval]

Team One are pulling up at the Marathon Gas station in El Dorado as Team 2 are slowing to enter the community of Center Point – which is something of an intriguing name, given that (so far as you can tell), it’s nowhere near the center of anything.

This place already has two strikes against it because it’s dangerously close to Zone Red, and because the guidebook index shows three different places =in Arkansas alone= with the same name! But if there’s a brilliant choice to put on the table, it deserves to be rejected AFTER proper consideration, and not before.

Center Point, =Howard County,= is an unincorporated community. According to the guidebook, which is very short on details, Center Point is also the closest community to, or the location of, four sites of historical significance – one camp-site (the only such listed, about which you care not a whit), and three houses, two of them to the East on Route 26, and one to the south on Route 4. Since your route into ‘town’ is on Route 26, making this a quick whistle-stop was a no-brainier.

Center Point was once important, serving as the county seat from 1873 to 1905. Near the geographic center of the county as it was then, it actually got it’s name because the post office established in 1849 was located at the crossroads that served as a hub for trade throughout southwestern Arkansas.

This is a tiny hamlet that didn’t know how to stop fighting the Civil War. There was a spirit of Lawlessness in the region during the war (when most of the young men were off fighting for the Confederacy) which continued into the Reconstruction, when regular conflicts would materialize between Confederate sympathizers and Union supporters. Martial law had to be imposed =repeatedly= to restore peace. =Resistance= to martial law resulted in three dead, 12 injured, and more than 60 arrested – from both sides. Many of the White citizens fled the city, leaving possession to the army and the Black citizens, some of whom claimed movable property like clothing for themselves. Eventually the violence was suppressed, the army left, and the whites who had fled (most of them) crept back, one by one, until the cycle repeated itself. To the locals, this was just ‘robust political debate’, a practice that they still occasionally follow. One Colonel suggested that it was the spending power of the soldiers that was the real motivation for the friction.

Although Center Point had been a legal and business center for most of the 19th century, railroad construction connected with the nearby Nashville instead, whose citizens began to lobby for a relocation of the county seat. A fire in 1901 devastated the downtown area, completely razing nine businesses and eight homes. This distraction enabled proponents of Nashville to win a county-wide election in 1904, and the county records were moved the next year. This was the beginning of a slow death for the township, and something that the residents still mutter darkly about from time to time.

Development in the early decades of the 20th century seemed to show growth, such as the establishment of a school, but these institutions and the county legacies all slowly withered and died. The school burned down in 1943, and after seven years of failing to rebuild it, the district was consolidated with that of a school in Nashville. The courthouse was torn down in 1945 so that a store and cafe could be built on the site. A tornado destroyed both, =and= the Methodist church, in 1968, but the congregation rebuilt the church. Two fires in 1972 destroyed the last two historic businesses. The Post Office closed later that year.

Because of its past importance, Preservationists lobbied intensively, and managed to place the three houses mentioned on the National Register of Historic Places as well as the Ebenezer Campground, which had been the site from which the Army based themselves during the periods of martial law.
.
13 years ago, there were still two grocery stores, a laundromat (called a ‘washateria’), a restaurant and bakery, two gas stations, and five churches (one in semi-decay). Now only a handful of houses, one of the gas stations (which also serves as a general store), and a hair salon, continue to function – and the salon operates out of a trailer. Everything else burned to the ground during Ragnarok.

• Clardy-Lee House AR 26
  50 feet past the ‘city limits’ of Center Point lies the Clardy-Lee House, a once-great mansion that has been left to the elements for three decades and one cataclysm. Restoring this place would be a civic virtue, but it would cost millions and take years. Just enough remains to show you what could have been, and it’s a heartbreaking sight. (08-209a)
   
• Adam Boyd House AR 26
  Route 26 ceases to exist at the exact center of Center Point, where it intersects with Highway 278. About 500 feet later, and about 100 feet outside of town, it reappears starting with a left-hand turn. 1000 feet after that, a turn-off to the right, opposite the Cemetery, takes you to what is theoretically a 285-foot lane, at the end of which lies what is left of the Adam Boyd House, whose chimney is marked with an arrow in this picture. And yes, someone has cut through the gate with an angle-grinder (yellow, arrow) (08-209b).

  A single-story dwelling which was constructed in 1848 in the architectural style known as a ‘dog-trot’ according to the rusting plaque in front of the burned-out hulk, The house is now a crumbling ruin. The rear portion has collapsed into a pile of brick; the wooden floor and interior walls are splintered and uneven. It is so far gone that even the local historian, though a staunch preservationist, has said, “Frankly, it is not worth restoring. Too much of the historical value would have to be lost just to make the building livable.” No joy here, then.
   

• Russey-Murray House AR 4
  Also known locally as ‘the old brick house’, this place is to be found 1.7 miles farther along highway 278 beyond the turn-off of the reconstituted Route 26, about 3 minutes drive. Unfortunately, when you get there, all that’s left is the turn-off onto the land and some concrete foundations. There isn’t even a plaque to tell you why the place might have been significant. Thankfully, the guidebook is more forthcoming, though you have to chase the information down through three separate references to find it. (08-209c)

  According to legend, the Russey-Murray House was a sturdy house, made of bricks forged by American Indians, wrought from the unsettled wilds of Arkansas under the watchful eye of their master, John Russey, in 1851. Once thought to be the oldest brick building west of the Mississippi (but it wasn’t), it was still likely to be the oldest dogtrot (a type of house with a breezeway separating its two portions) in Arkansas – though the breezeway was later covered. It had already collapsed by the time the National Register approved its’ preservation, just as the Adam Boyd house had burnt down.

All told, it’s taken about 7 minutes to explore Center Point, and despite having three potential targets, not one of them has been worth the time expended on it. What’s more, you have another 4 wasted minutes heading back into and through what is laughingly considered a town before you can turn onto Highway 278 and head toward your next opportunity, the town of Dierks.

In fact, the most notable contribution towards the success of your mission is that you have now implemented a Driver Change, and St Barbara is now behind the wheel!

DIRECTIONS:
8.5 miles NNW on Highway 278 to Dierks

     2.33 miles @ 35mph ave
     8.5 miles @ 55 mph
     ETA Dierks 6+47

T2: 6+39
     159 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: between 3/4 and full
     Sched stop in apr 2 hrs
     Sched stop in apr 4 hrs
     Sched end of day in apr 5 h 45 m

=================================================================

108 Strong 12+54 PM to 1+9 [Drive-through]

Three minutes after Team 2 depart from Center Point, Team one see the first sign that they are reaching the minuscule community of Strong, whose name makes it sound like the perfect place for a superhero team to call home.

Officially, this is just supposed to be a drive-through evaluation, but you’ve been reading the guidebook and think that the town offers more promise than that.

So far, you’ve covered 186 miles, explored 8 official targets, and had lunch, all of which should have taken you 10h 51m by the official estimates – but you’re now just over 4 hours ahead of schedule. You’re supposed to cover 12h of ground per day, at an average of 40 miles an hour – at the rate you’re going, it will only take about 8 hours to complete your targets for the day.

You’ll keep going until you get the full 12 hours done, of course, because you don’t know what tomorrow may bring, and you might need every minute of the advantage that you’ve built up to make your long-term schedule – but you can certainly afford to spend a few extra minutes looking into a hot prospect or two along the way! The unilateral decision has therefore been made, without actually discussing it, to do an unofficial but full-scale evaluation of the multiple prospects Strong seems to offer.

GUIDEBOOK:
Strong is a small city of 700 people with a rapidly declining population. At it’s peak, in the mid-70s, the population barely scraped 1000, the number of residents required for an urban center to be officially designated a city, but it didn’t sustain that population for very long.

The “city” occupies 1.11 square miles. The racial makeup is 42% White, 54% Black, and 6% Hispanic/Latino (there is some overlap). Median age of the residents is 36, and there are 75 males for every 100 females. 32% live in poverty, including 48% of children, which is worse than usual for Arkansas.

October, May and April are (respectively) the three most pleasant months in this part of the world, while July and August are least comfortable. Located in Union County, just seven miles north of the Louisiana border, this area is more like the swamp-and-bayou state than many parts of that actual state.

The community was founded in the early 20th century as a settlement along the railroad tracks, and originally named Victoria. It grew quickly at first, becoming an important shipping station for local farm products, especially cotton. The current name derives from the surveyor sent to inspect the land offered to the railroad by owner Solomon Coleman – who did not offer to sell the land to the railroad, just grant a right-of-way. William Strong accepted the offer after inspecting the land, and Coleman had 120 acres surveyed and subdivided and began to sell lots. The first settler was Henry Clay and his family; Clay would become the first law-enforcement officer within the community. It was recognized as a Second-class City on Sept 7, 1903.

Confusion over the name arose sometime after its incorporation as Victoria, when Coleman named the train stop Strong. When the post office was relocated from nearby Concord to the growing community in 1903, it was found that a post office named Victoria already existed, so a year later, the city was re-chartered under the name Strong. Even into the 1940s, locals continued to refer to it as Victoria, and there are still a few old-timers who do so to this day.

Growth continued to be healthy in the rechristened city, with timber becoming an increasingly important part of the economy. By 1920, the population exceeded 500, and growth would remain steady until the 1960s, despite the city being struck by a tornado in 1927, completely destroying an area three blocks wide and a mile and a half long. Thirty were killed and 100 or more injured. Some of the dead were buried in combined funerals, with as many as 15 being laid to rest at the same time. When the central business district was rebuilt, they were substantial brick structures.

In the 30s, Strong had a reputation as a rough place, home to several houses of prostitution. Local moonshiners took advantage of prohibition, and when it was repealed, the city had no less than eight alcohol-serving establishments, able to accommodate more than 1/4 of the local population simultaniously. This included one infamously named the “Bloody Bucket”. Alcohol-fueled fights were common, and deaths an occasional consequence.

The Great Depression hit Strong hard, and recovery was slow. Following WW2, there was a concerted effort to restore prosperity to the area. Several targets were nominated for civic improvement. The first project was a citywide clean-up program. For several weeks, the business district closed each Wednesday, and citizens went around town cleaning and repairing whatever needed work. After the cleanup, streets were graveled, the city park was renovated, a municipal water system was added, a medical clinic built and opened, and a volunteer fire department established.

Slow growth continued through the 1960s but it was declining in pace. After one last growth spurt in the 1970s, Strong began a general but slow decline, which it has yet to arrest.

A Bank, two taverns, two sawmills, a large warehouse, an apartment block, a hotel, a movie theater, a general store, and a livery stable were all abandoned and empty at the time of the guidebook’s writing. Some of these were being remodeled into homes or apartment blocks, and some have been deliberately distressed in an effort to lure tourists to the “ghost town that will not die”, but some have simply been abandoned. There are some engineers who are closely monitoring the decay of the latter in comparison to the deliberate deconstruction of other structures.

EVALUATION:
The first thing you notice is the local speed limit, which has been set at a somewhere-in-between value of 45mph; most communities in Arkansas using 35., while the highways restrict speeds to 55. You soon discover that Strong is a relatively dispersed community these days, with many empty lots. Since it’s common for there to be no fences between properties (it’s just one more thing that needs to be maintained), this gives the township a very open feel, a casualness that you would expect to find reflected in the attitudes of the locals. Every time you think you’ve reached the end of the built-up area, after a short stand of trees, there is a new clearing. You suspect that many non-local drivers get caught out by this, accelerating beyond the speed limit because they think the town is about to come to an end when it’s just getting started! It’s the same situation on the back streets – the view down second avenue is quite typical (09-108a). (2 mins)

This is in marked contrast to the brick building – and it is effectively one big brick building – that was constructed on main street after the tornado. These days, businesses and tradesmen who would not normally conduct business on a main street are on public display – you pass a carpenter sawing lumber on two wooden horses in what would, in most places, be considered a sidewalk, while the customer waits next to his parked pick-up. But about one in three of the shopfronts now stands empty; you realize that the city must be sponsoring rents to keep as many doors open as possible, enabling businesses that don’t usually feature in such locations to use a shopfront as a workshop (09-108b). (4 mins)

One of the benefits of a slow decay and a determined local administration is that a huge amount of greenery has had time to become established. Nothing now remains of the decaying structures of yesterday; they have all been torn down and the land cleared and planted with grass, bushes, and trees, to now resemble a park. Some lots are offered as ‘ready to build”, like this one (09-108c). (6 mins)

Notice that you can’t see another building anywhere in the shot – there must be some, but privacy (despite the general lack of fences) is remarkably high. Others are small cottages on tracts of land described as ‘plantation-ready” (09-108d)…. (8 mins)

…while still others are “plantations, ready to harvest” (09-108e)… (10 mins)

…or ‘recreation areas’, including one described as 105 acres and an ongoing business (09-108f). (12 mins)

So non-urban are the urban areas that the occasional specimen of wildlife roams freely within the town limits. Even normally very shy creatures seem at home (09-108g). (13 mins)

In several of the towns you’ve visited, it’s been the immaculate condition of the church compared to the houses that has been the defining imagery. Here, it’s the sign on the wall of the high school (09-108h)…

…with letters out of alignment, coming adrift, bent out of shape, and even the wrong size. You have the impression that should one of these come astray, it wouldn’t be replaced; instead, careful plaster-work and color matching would be used to make the wall look like the missing letter had never even been part of the sign. (15 mins)

VERDICT:
If you like small towns, this would be a great one to move to, you think, but it’s a near-certainty that you would need to build for yourself. If you had unlimited time and a substantial budget, it would be a great place to set up a public base from scratch, and the community would appreciate any influx of vitality and confidence far more than most; they would bend over backwards to accommodate you. In this case, though, you are looking to establish a covert base in something of a hurry – and only traffic is in a hurry in Strong. But even though the verdict was a wet firecracker, that was still 15 minutes well-spent, you think.

Directions: East on Highway 82 to Crossett, 28 minutes away. Revised ETA 7+33

T1: 6+57
     233 min ahead of schedule
     AC: ON
     Fuel Tank: a whisker below full
     Sched stop in apr 1 hr 20 m
     Sched stop in apr 3 hr 20 m
     Sched end of day in apr 5 h 5 m

=================================================================

209 TEAM 2 ENCOUNTER, 5 miles @ 55 mph = 12+56 PM

210 Burg (Township)
You’re about five miles out of Center Point as Team one study the shopfronts of Strong, when you come across a farmer striving to plow a field, presumably to sow a winter crop. Although, he doesn’t seem to be working very hard; the ones who are really striving are the ten small lizard-like men with red skin who are harnessed into a yoke and pulling the plow while the owner sits in a folding chair in the shade of a large tree, a whip at his side. You can drive on by, or stop and talk to the motley crew – though you had better get their owner’s permission first or he might use that whip when you’ve gone…. (09-209d)

Owner: “Sure’n they’s due fer a break, anyways. (with ‘come here’ hand gestures). Sooey! Ten minutes! Gather round, get yoursselfs a drink from the trough, then these folks wanna talk to you some.”

The Koblids have very little English. Vala can speak with them directly, as can anyone who speaks Imperial Mandarin. They get paid for their work in food and lodgings and are satisfied with their lot.

The farmer recognizes some of the words in their answer, or interprets (correctly) their gestures, and says, “Figured it’d be somethin’ like that. Now lissen up, ah ain’t gonna repeat myself. The Koblids jes ‘peared outta nowhere, all plumb tuckered out and dusty, oh ’bout five years ago, trying to steal chickens from mah coop. They got caught, but mah wife figured someone wouldn’t try ‘at lessen they wuz starvin’ hungry, so she fed ’em up some. Next day, they wuz tryin’ tah help out and makin’ one unholy mess ’cause-a they had no bloody idea what they wuz doin’. But they learned quick-like, and became the farmhands that I hadn’t had since the sky burned. The way I figure it, if’n they don’t work for me, we all starve. And when I pass, this place is all theirs – I ain’t got no kin left. So they’s workin’ for themselves, too. Besides, the tractor will be fixed next week.”

If asked about the whip, he simply says that sometimes when things get loud you need a loud noise to get their attention. And if a snake shows up, he might need it as a weapon, because the Koblids keep tryin’ to befriend them.

“Mine isn’t the only farm in these parts with Koblid workers, either – probably six in ten do, and more than half would-a gone under without it. But his is likely one of the only ones they will actually inherit when the time comes. So sure, you can arrest him for not payin’ ’em wages – even though they ain’t citizens, and ain’t even human, so the labor laws don’t apply to ’em. And the ones that will be hurt the worst if you do will be the Koblids.”

(This all reveals another facet of the complicated post-Ragnarok world that the players probably haven’t considered). 10 mins.

Revised ETA, Dierks 1+10 PM

=================================================================

210 Dierks 1+10 PM to 1+26 [Major Eval]

As Team One look at casual Deer in Strong, Team Two reach Dierks.

This city of around 1250 people, first settled in 1848, was (at the time) a dense forest of Pine, Oak, and Hickory trees. Only one wagon trail connected the settlement to anywhere – in this case, to Center Point.

During the Civil War, the citizens were vehement Confederates and tension was high between locals and the Union Militia. The KKK was active in the area at the time.

It was once known as Hardscrabble, but the name was changed in the early 1900s to commemorate Hans Dierks, eldest of four brothers who owned the Dierks Lumber and Coal Company. The DeQueen and Eastern railroad was established to move workers and supplies into the area and carry lumber to market, prompting rapid growth and an influx of more tolerant attitudes.

Dierks is located in the central north of Howard County, along the southern edge of the Ouchita Mountains. It sits in the valley of Holly Creek, a southwest-flowing tributary of the Saline River, which has been known to occasionally burst its banks producing local flooding. The city has a total area of 1.9 square miles, all land, but 7 miles northwest of the city limits, Dierks Lake (a reservoir on the Saline River) provides a popular fishing spot and three different camping areas: Jefferson Ridge, Blue Ridge, and Horseshoe Bend.

The climate in the area is not greatly dissimilar to that of similar areas within the southwest of Arkansas. What variation exists is due to the mountains, which give the community an elevation of 443 ft. The area is subject to occasional tornadoes, the last of which struck the town in 1952, killing eight and destroying many buildings. This is now considered a 70-year disaster.

1952 was a bad year for the community; in August, the Dierks Bank failed, owing $160,000 in investor funds. By 1954, the Horatio State Bank had taken possession of the building previously occupied by the former bank and opened a branch. These days, three other banks also have branches in town.

Population density is medium, and the racial profile is 96% White, 1% Black, 1% Native American, And 2% Latino. Median age is 38, and there are 85 men for every woman. 13% of the population are in poverty.

The local school district includes an elementary school and a high school, whose teams (football, baseball, basketball, and hockey) are the Outlaws and whose mascot is a horse named Blue. The Outlaws were the Class B State Champs in Football in 1975.

Dierks reflects its logging heritage in an annual Pine Tree Festival the first weekend of August every year, which is held at the local park (if it’s not under water). There are vendor’s booths and various games and activities, including Loader contest, BBQ cook-off, tractor show, car show, talent show, and a concert with a country singer or band.

Dierks’ residents describe themselves as good god-fearin’ folk, and there are seven churches within the community. They also pride themselves on being the Gateway to the Ouchita (“Waa-sheet-a”) Mountains.

EVALUATION:
Dierks is a community trying hard to look like they have cleaned up their act from a somewhat rebellious past – perhaps trying a little too hard, as they also seem to be proud of their history and heritage and want to embrace it (09-210a). (1 min)

There may be four banks funneling capital into the town, but there are seven churches soaking it up, leaving relatively less for the community to access – so there is one supermarket, and it’s in a shed located on a side-road. With one ice machine and one soft-drink vending machine. And a confederacy flag on the wall (09-210b). (2 mins)

This is such prime recruiting ground for the Klan that you would be astonished if they weren’t around, just keeping a lower profile than usual. Sure enough, it’s not long before you spot a pick-up truck with Klan symbols (09-210c). (3 mins)

Even if you were willing to overlook these minor quibbles, the fact of the matter is that none of the unoccupied buildings around town are big enough for your needs. The houses are too small (09-210d)… (4 mins)

…and/or too rustic (09-210e). (5 mins)

And it’s only when you locate the largest home in town (09-210f)… (7 mins)

….that you realize that you haven’t seen a single building =of any kind= with a ‘for sale’ sign showing. Not a one. That implies some sort of private sale, old-boys’ network – and the ‘old boys’ in these parts aren’t friendly beneath the surface.

VERDICT:
You’d probably love to make life uncomfortable for them, but that’s exactly the sort of thing you can’t afford to do at this point, not without risking the primary mission. But in terms of an operational BOps, this is far too close to one or more enemies to serve even if there was a reasonable building to consider.

Directions:
NNE Highway 278 (labeled Highway 70!) 3.3 miles to left turn (stays Highway 278), 7.4 miles approx NNW to Burg then NE followed by slightly W of North 3.8 miles on Highway 278 to Umpire. Into the mountains (10-210g), where the =real= rednecks live (supposedly)!

     1.4 miles urban @ 35 mph
     3.3 miles highway ’70’ @ 55 mph
     7.4 miles highway 278 to Burg @ 55 mph
          Burg ETA 7+28

     3.8 miles highway 278 to Umpire @ 55 mph
          Umpire ETA 7+32

T2: 7+14
     152 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: 3/4 full
     Sched stop in apr 1 hr
     Sched stop in apr 3 hrs
     Sched end of day in apr 4 h 45 m

=================================================================

109 Crossett 1+37 PM to 3+2 [Major Eval}

Team One might have fewer targets, but they have more =big= targets. Crosset has a population of 6,500 occupying 5.79 square miles of land, making it one of the largest communities that you’ve visited in Arkansas; it’s actually large enough to have suburbs. It’s taken almost half an hour to drive here from Strong. What’s more, the city is about 7 miles wide (E-W) and 3½ miles deep (N-S) – exploring it fully will consume quite a lot of the advantage that you had built up since just crossing it once from NW to SE will take about 15 minutes. Realistically, 45 minutes to an hour can be consumed poking around just the key points of a city this size – which forewarns you of what it will be like when you have to evaluate Little Rock on Day 3. And that’s before you spend any time considering possible contenders, and you are sure that there will BE some in a city of this size. Still, that’s what the saved time is there for!

GUIDEBOOK:
There are four properties on Main Street in Crossett listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as well as the Crossett Experimental Forest, located 7 mi (11 km) south.

60% of the population are White, 39% Black, and 1% Hispanic/Latino. The median age is 38 years and there are 83 adult men for every 100 adult women. 17% of the population are below the poverty line and 30% of the children, both notable lower than many other places within the state. Politically, the city only leans conservative, making it one of the most progressive locations in Arkansas outside of Little Rock. This attitude is the legacy of the founders of the city who forged an official relationship with the School of Forestry at Yale University in 1912, and the lumber companies in the region became the leading employer of Yale-trained forestry graduates, which resulted in improved manufacturing and farming practices. It was the Yale influence that led to the creation in 1934 of the Experimental Forest.

As calamities unfolded in the first half of the 20th century, Crossett seemed to dance between them, untouched; the Roaring Twenties, Great Depression, two World Wars and even the Civil Rights upheavals of the 50s came and went without major disturbance to the community. Following the Brown v. Board of Education (Topeka, Kansas) decision in 1954, leaders in both the black and white communities engaged in talks which finally resulted in the integration of the Crossett schools in 1968 without incident.

The climate is characterized by hot, humid summers and generally mild to cool winters. October, May and April are the most pleasant months in Crossett, while July and August are the least comfortable months. It is located just nine miles north of the Louisiana border.

The major employer in the town is the Georgia-Pacific paper mill and allied industries make up a substantial portion of what’s left.

Property is very expensive here, with some homes priced at more than $500,000. Most homes in the city are priced below $79,000.
However, the cost of living is almost 30% lower than the USNA average.

The city is large enough to have a zoo and a first class airport, capable of handling small corporate jets on its 5,000 foot runway. This is not an accident.

EVALUATION:
The welcome sign is, appropriately, beside a pine nursery and a stand of old-growth forest preserved from exploitation (10-109a). (0 mins)

The main shopping center is neat and modern, and there are very few empty storefronts (ignore the cars, which are too modern) (10-109b). (5 mins)

The public library is reassuringly large and well-maintained – in fact, you’ve seen smaller county administrations (10-109c). (10 mins)

While the edges of the roads have an ‘unfinished’ and untidy look to them, and most are unmarked with center-lines (and sometimes narrow), the verges are very green and shady, and homes are well-separated. Large blocks of land appear to be the norm. As with other towns you’ve looked through in this part of Arkansas, there don’t appear to be very many fences between properties, creating a stronger sense of a local community – that might be problematic for the keeping of secrets (10-109d). (15 mins)

The Post Office still manages to retain a ‘municipal building’ feeling to it – the locals’ progressiveness appears to have its limits. Bonus points for incorporating the town logo into the sign, however (10-109e). (20 mins)

Rather more modern and not far away is the Biedenharn Museum & Gardens. This is a city which thinks there’s more to culture than country AND western (10-109f). (25 mins)

Some houses are small and designed to use the size of the blocks of land to create greater privacy (10-109g). (35 mins)

But many take advantage of the space available to accommodate 5, 6, 7, or even 8 bedrooms. Some are clearly built on double-blocks.

CONTENDER #1: This plain and unassuming brick dwelling is a 7-bedroom and on the market for $612K (10-109h) (40 mins)

CONTENDER #2: This looks like a 4-bedroom until you notice the extra rooms on the second floor. A very unpretentious 7-bedroom house, then – again on a double-block, to have such a vast lawn. It would set you back $605K (10-109i). (45 mins)

There are two properties that are even larger, and in danger of becoming excessively run-down; both need renovating to at least some degree. The first (CONTENDER #3) is the Old Rose Inn, which was damaged during Ragnarok and never reopened after the subsequent death of the owner. It’s $725K, and would probably need $125K in repairs before it could function as anything more than a private residence. But it seems a shame for it to go to waste, it still has hints of past greatness about it. With 28 rooms per level, and some extras on the third level, even if you removed every second wall to open the rooms out into private suites, there is still more than enough capacity for the team (10-109j). (52 mins)

A little smaller and quite a lot creepier, but with even greater hints of former glory is the Hotel Crossett (CONTENDER #4) (10-109k).

Now quite dilapidated, it would cost $600K to acquire it’s 23 rooms and probably another $4-500K to refurbish. It does occur to you that you could hire an army of workmen to restore these places and have a perfectly-obvious justification for not being around while the repairs are carried out. This place is probably old enough to be on the national register of historic landmarks but its condition seems to have precluded that. Restoring it would erase some of the historic value but preserve what’s left. Although the building looks to be in rough condition, closer inspection shows much of the damage to be cosmetic, but not all. Probably 1/2 of the building is still structurally sound, quite enough for you to use as temporary accommodations. Alternatively, you could buy it and leave it like this for a while until ‘the blueprints are finalized’. (70 mins)

VERDICT:
There are four contenders here with varying shades of appeal. #1 is only just big enough but it is modern and new. Perhaps a 3½ out of 5.

#2 is slightly bigger in capacity but the rooms are smaller; it is modern and new, and traditional at the same time. Same score, but for different reasons.

#3 is a lot of work but more than big enough to house the team in luxury and deserves to be saved. Probably a 4 out of 5, maybe even nudging toward 4½.

All of which goes double for #4. It’s so good that it even generates its own cover stories! If it had already been refurbished, it might be a 5 – but as it stands, it’s only a 4-to-4½.

It’s taken so long to thoroughly examine Crossett that you’re overdue for a 5-minute rest stop.
(roleplay)

T1: 8+50
     241 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: a little over 1/2 full
     Sched stop in apr 1 h 10 m
     Sched end of day in apr 3 h 10 m

Directions:
North on Route 133 to North Crossett then Route 133 to a right turn onto route 8 to Fountain Hill, highway 425 into Fountain Hill, then NW then West on Route 160 then Route 8 to Johnsville, North on Route 8 to Highway 63 to Warren.

     4.3 miles in Crossett to North Crossett @ 35 mph
          ETA North Crossett 9+1

     12.6 miles through North Crossett on Route 133 @ 95
     Turn right onto Route 8
     3.8 miles @ 75 mph
     Turn left onto highway 425
          ETA Fountain Hill 9+12

     0.3 miles through Fountain Hill on Route 8 @ 60 mph
     0.2 miles through Fountain Hill on Highway 425 @ 55 mph
     Left turn one block after the Fountain Hill United Methodist Church on Mulberry St onto Route 160
     0.4 miles through Fountain Hill to the University Pointe Apartments @ 35 mph
          ETA Through Fountain Hill 9+13

     10.7 miles @ 75 on Route 160 to Johnsville
          ETA Johnsville 9+22

     You then have to stay on route 160 to drive through Johnsville and then turn back to the NE through back streets to join Route 8.

     0.3 miles @ 25 mph
     13.2 miles on Route 8 @ 80 mph
     Right turn onto Highway 63
     2.5 miles on Highway 63 to Warren @ 55 mph
          ETA Warren 9+35

=================================================================

210 Burg (Township) 1+40 PM

You knew from looking at the map that Umpire, your next planned target, was going to be a lot smaller than Dierks, and from the fact that you couldn’t even find Burg on the map, that it was going to be even smaller than Umpire! But 15 minutes after leaving Dierks, and about 4 minutes after the other team reach Crossett, you bear witness to what there is of this tiny place.

According to your guidebook, Burg is a populated place where a minor road branches off the highway. It has a cemetery. When you get to it, it’s four homes, a caravan, and a shed. Looking through the trees, you spot another farmhouse or two in the distance. It has a total population of about 60 people. It’s so small that there isn’t even a posted speed limit. (10-210a)

T2: 7+28
160 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: a whisker below 3/4 full
     Sched stop in apr 45 m
     Sched stop in apr 2 h 45 m
     Sched end of day in apr 4 h 30 m

=================================================================

As you can see, there’s quite a lot that never got mentioned in the synopsis!

Prepared Material for Session 23

And so to the material actually played through this weekend.

211 Umpire 1+44 PM to 2+23

Four minutes after whistling through Burg, and seven minutes after the first team reach the City of Crossett, Team Two reach the township of Umpire, which is an unincorporated community in Howard County – essentially a small collection of houses and perhaps a store or two in a single spot without a municipal government; what local government it has is provided by some nearby community or by the county overall. It has frequently been noted on lists of unusual place names.

In the early 1890s a new gristmill opened in the area. There was a celebratory baseball game after which a schoolteacher addressed the crowd and suggested the name Umpire for the new post office, reportedly because the Umpire did an outstanding job overseeing the game – though it’s also possible that this story is apocryphal. Despite it’s tiny size, Umpire has both an Elementary and High School. There is also a small Seventh-day Adventist School. It is located almost 850 feet above sea level, and has a population of about 420.

Umpire includes 6.697 nearby mining claims, only 18 of which are active. All are located in the mountains north of the community There have been 79 actual =mines= opened, and only 43 of those actually produced Uranium, which is the primary mineral of interest in the area.

The area is one of small, fast-flowing creeks and rivers. Mineral run-off frequently gives the water a silvery sheen, as though it were made of cobwebs.

Thick forests pocket the region and are home to deer and other wildlife. Drivers need to beware as these can emerge without warning onto the roads. Hunting and fishing are popular tourist activities.

EVALUATION:
Umpire is too close to zone red for comfort – the Oklahoma border is only 39 km away! Which means that any prospects here have to be evaluated with a grain of salt. Which is something of a shame, because – much to your surprise – this turns out to be a target-rich environment. You weren’t even in town proper when you came across a stand of forest with a buck calmly watching traffic drive past (10-211b). (1 min)

Just around the corner, there is a dirt driveway off to the right, which leads to a six-bedroom home atop the hill and past a stream (10-211c).

This might, perhaps, be too small because it takes four men working full-time to look after the 500 attached acres of farmlands. But it’s for sale and definitely has to go on the list. (2 min)

A little closer to town, atop another ridge, this time with a gravel driveway, there’s an even larger farm and larger farmhouse (10-211d).

This would accommodate 10 or more people and even has it’s own in-ground swimming pool! Again, staff numbers might reduce the viable accommodation space too low, however.(4 min)

Just past the second farmhouse there’s a scenic photography rest-stop containing an extremely picturesque creek, fulfilling one of the tourism promises of the guidebook. This creek (10-211e)…

…actually runs through the property of the second farm! (5 min)

The town itself is unremarkable; most of the homes are too small to be of interest, though the setting is extremely pretty (10-211f). (7 min)

But the real potential of this location lies in those abandoned mines. Even excluding the ones that actually contained Uranium as too dangerous still leaves 36 shafts that were dug thirty years or more ago on sheer bravura, that subsequently proved worthless, and that should be reasonably safe – especially if surreptitiously reinforced and shielded by the team. There’s even a large settlement not too far away where any needed supplies / furnishings could be obtained. Throw in a hire truck to transport them, and the proposal at least sounds viable (10-211g).

But assessing the potential requires information that no-one on the team could provide – how deeply were the shafts dug? How stable were they? How toxic are the environments? How much would it cost to buy the abandoned claim and disused worthless mine-shaft Does the potential security gain from simply moving into one offset the legal risks – and the zone red risks? How tightly regulated are abandoned uranium mines, and how many hoops would the team have to jump through?

Zantar doesn’t want you to actually inspect any of these mines – that might give the game away – but he =does= want you to get as much information from the US Geological Survey office as they will give you. It turns out that the USGS share office space with a number of other government agencies in the one building in Umpire, which looks like a large, repurposed, house. Only the size of the lawn makes it clear that this is a civic structure, because only a government office could afford to maintain it! (10-211h) (12 min)

Erik Burns, the USGS Geologist stationed there (10-211i)

….proves to be one of those instantly likable people that seem to get on with everyone. He’s more than happy to ramble on about any subject, and very difficult to deflect until he’s said his piece.

To actually reach the mine-shafts, he tells you, you would need to travel Northeast from Umpire to the Burg-sized hamlet of Athens and then either turn off onto route 246 and the hamlet of Vandervoort, or continue to the town of Langley and turn left onto route 369, which eventually connects with route 375, which connects to route 246, and leads to the town of Hatfield. Trails leading to the mines, he says, all connect to =one= of these roads. Which one depends on which mine you’re looking for. (10-211j)

You’ve at least heard the names of some of these towns before – Hatfield, Cove, and Vandervoort are all your list of destinations. The rest are a complete mystery. He then starts talking about safety, and uranium density, and purity, and shipping costs, and potential customers, and thorium cross-sections, and the quality of dust masks, and water seepage, and a dozen other things that he thinks you should know, each time adding a pamphlet or booklet to a box for you to take with you and study. You notice that many of them have a price printed on the back – by your rough estimate, he’s given you almost $100 worth of publications. Do any of you feel guilty about taking such advantage of his generosity? If so, what are you going to do about it?

It isn’t long before you are weighed down with a box full of materials on mining licenses, mineralogical reports, a list of the claims and how extensively they were worked, when a mine site was last active, monitoring regulations, and a whole bunch of government forms – and the information that all disused Uranium Mines are carefully inspected every 3-6 months to ensure that no-one starts unauthorized mining operations that could lead to fissionable material being smuggled to one of the US’ many enemies. This alone takes the ‘mine’ idea off the table, at least in this part of the world – but it would have looked =highly= suspicious if you hadn’t taken the other materials after hearing about the inspections. (+8 min)

VERDICT:
The mines were a nice idea, but not one that will work.

The farmhouses would work, but are too small to properly maintain the land they sit on AND house the team. But they do provide renewed hope.

It’s now been two hours since your last rest break, so it’s probably a good idea to pause for a snack somewhere in Umpire. (+10 min). With that factored in, the time-hack is 8+9 when you finally leave town.

Directions: Continue West 18 miles on Highway 278 to Wickes.
     1 urban mile @ 35 mph
     18 miles @ 55 mph
          ETA Wickes 8+32

T2: 8+12
     149 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: a whisker over 1/2 full
     Sched stop in apr 1 h 50m
     Sched end of day in apr 3 h 50 m

=================================================================

212 Wickes 2+54 PM to 2+58 [Major Eval]

Team 2 always had the more ambitious schedule. They have covered 339 miles as they approach Wickes, seven miles from the Oklahoma border, investigated 11 designated targets (and had lunch) in 8h 32m. They are also ahead of schedule by more than 2 hours. Their plans are much like those of Team 1 – do the full day’s work and get ahead if they can, purely so that they have some flexibility up their sleeves.

Nevertheless, and bearing that tightness of schedule in mind, Wickes is probably too close to Zone Red for anything worthwhile to come from it, and the same is true for the drive-by evaluations that follow; you can’t take them seriously. The major target after this one, Mena, might be a different story, since it’s one of the larger population centers in these parts.

The immediate task is to evaluate Wickes.

GUIDEBOOK:
Home to about 500 people (and growing at double-digit percentage rates each decade), Wickes is located in the foothills of the Ouchita (“Waa-sheet-a”) mountains. Five rivers originate in the county around Wickes, including the Cossatot, which is considered the hardest river to navigate in Arkansas because of its rapids – the name is an Indian word meaning “Skull-crusher”.

Wickes has historic places such as the 100-year-old City Hall and the Lighthouse Drive-in. Nearby is the Boggs Springs Youth Encampment of the American Baptist Association, a retreat of Missionary Baptist churches, and the Cassatot River State National Park, which is the largest wilderness preserve in the entire state. A number of rare species of plant and two unique varieties of fish can be found there. A mountain lodge atop Ward Mountain is also famous.

The community occupies 2.34 square miles, giving it quite a low population density. About 10% of the population have Latino or Hispanic roots, 80% are White, more than 3% Native American, and there is also a considerable Asian presence. Median age is just 26, which is as much as 13 years lower than other places you’ve visited, and there is something very close to gender equality. 37% of the population live in poverty, but the median household income is $9,430 – a lot higher than some of the other places you’ve been – which implies that there are some big earners at the top end of town.

Wickes incorporated as a second-class city in 1944, just in time to be decimated by sending a generation of men to War; 5 of 6 did not return.

Wickes’ story seems to steal all it’s other important elements from the histories of nearby towns, it all sounds awfully familiar. Railroad town, boomed off the back of the timber industry, and a bit of coal or other minerals, but these days it survives on the poultry industry.

EVALUATION:
Altogether, there are more red flags here than you can count. Economic Disparity? Check. Strongly Religious? Check. Historically respectful in the rural South? Check. High poverty rate? Check. High youth demographic? Check. Right next to Zone Red? Check.

All of which might be doing the town a disservice – but if even half of them are accurate, it would be enough to knock a five-star prospect down to an also-ran. Some of the locations are very pretty, there is no denying that, and there’s one house for sale that is almost (but not quite) big enough, with 6 bedrooms (10-212a). (4 mins)

But it says something that the majority of pictures about the town show pictures of the surrounding wilderness (10-212b).

And the majority of the rest are pictures of the roads =out= of town (10-212c).

VERDICT:
Which road led out of town again?

T2: 8+46
     146 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: 1/2 full
     Sched stop in apr 1 hr 15
     Sched end of day in apr 3 h 15 m

Directions NNW then NE on Highway 88 via Hatton, Vandervoort, Cove, Hatfield, and Potter Junction to Mena.

     1.6 miles @ 50 mph in Wickes on Highway 59
     2.8 miles on Highway 59 @ 55 mph
          ETA Hatton 8+38

     0.2 miles @ 35 mph on Country Road 18 in Hatton
     1.8 miles @ 50 mph on Country Road 18 to Vandervoort
          ETA Vandervoort 8+44

     0.5 miles @ 35 mph on 3rd Street in Vandervoort
     Turn Left onto Route 246
     0.2 miles on Route 246 in Vandervoort @ 35 mph
     1 mile on Route 246 toward Cove @ 75 mph
     Turn Right onto Highway 71
     4.1 miles on Highway 71 to Cove @ 90 mph
          ETA Cove 8+48

     1 mile on Highway 71 in Cove @ 35 mph
     3.2 miles on Highway 71 to Hatfield @ 90 mph
          ETA Hatfield 8+52

     1 mile on Highway 71 in Hatfield @ 35 mph
     5 miles on Highway 71 to Potter Junction @ 80 mph
          ETA Potter Junction 8+58

     1 mile on Highway 71 in Potter Junction @ 35 mph
     5 miles on Highway 59 (the same road) to Mena @ 55 mph
          ETA Mena 3+31

=================================================================

212 Hatton 3 PM to 3+3 [Drive-through]

Just 2 minutes after leaving Wickes, Team Two enter Hatton. It is so close to the preceding town that if the latter were larger, Hatton would be nothing more than an outer suburb. It’s also even closer to Zone Red by almost 2½ miles – and when you only have 7 to play with, that’s quite a lot. This unincorporated community is so small that it has never taken part in a USNA census, instead being considered part of the township of Ozark, which is an “everywhere else” catch-all within the county. Hatton’s major reasons for existing are manganese mining and wheat harvesting. There’s absolutely nothing here to attract your interest even without Zone Red considerations – unless you care about the early wheat harvest, I guess (10-212d).

T2: 8+51
     155 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: a whisker below 1/2 full
     Sched stop in apr 1 h 10 m
     Sched end of day in apr 2 h 10 m

=================================================================

212 Vandervoort 3+6 PM [Drive-through]

Less than three minutes after Hatton comes the community of Vandervoort. To get here, you actually have to drive off the main route, which is why the directions are so complicated.

This tiny community occupies almost 0.3 sqr miles and is home to a population of 87 people in 40-odd households. Population density is even lower than most low-density community.

It gets its name from the maiden name of the mother of an early 20th century railroad financier. Originally, it was named Janssen (with a double S) for his wife’s maiden name, but there was another town in Arkansas named Jansen (with only one S), and mail for the two towns was constantly being mixed up, leading to the change of name.

Since the community was bypassed by Highway 71, it has steadily declined. It is now principally a retirement community in Arkansas, and is the home of Watkins Trucking, a post office, a restaurant, and a city hall/rural volunteer fire department. In the surrounding area, many families still operate chicken, hog, and cattle farms.

There are almost 4800 mines near Vandervoort, but it is officially one of the 15 poorest cities in the entire state, so they aren’t very productive. There’s nothing of value in terms of a potential BOps here.

Notice the utter lack of speed limits… (10-212e)

T2: 8+54
     156 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: a whisker below 1/2 full
     Sched stop in apr 1 h 5 m
     Sched end of day in apr 2 h 5 m

=================================================================

109 North Crossett 3+9 PM [Drive-through]

After more than an hour spent in Crossett, it is actually a relief for Team 1 to be back on the open road. It’s surprising how quickly you’ve settled into the routine of this gypsy exploring!

North Crosset is an offshoot of Crossett that lies, unsurprisingly, just to the north of the city. Officially, this is a “Census-Designated Place” which is a concentration of dwellings that only exists as a separate entity in the minds of the US Census. So far as the residents are concerned, they are a part of Crossett.

This adds another 10.35 square miles to that city’s area and another 800-odd people. 10% of the population are Black, about 1/3 the percentage present in the city proper – so this is a White Suburb of the city. Median income is about 50% higher than the primary city, so this is also an affluent almost-suburb. Perhaps because the locals don’t want plebeian hordes in their vicinity, Route 133’s speed limit comes to an end about 2 miles past the Crossett city limits – a full mile before the end of the built-up area.

Given these facts, you’re fairly certain you know exactly what you’ll find if you look: modern, expensive homes, lots of trees and parks and gardens, significant snobbery levels, and absolutely nothing of interest to the team.

And yet, one glance at the guidebook contradicts this impression conclusively. The eastern part of North Crossett is given over to a College of Technology that in turn is part of the “University of Arkansas at Monticello”. That means that the ‘wealthy’ are researchers and educators and other professional services that support the institution. But you’re probably right about it being leafy, and about there being nothing of interest to you there. (No Pics)

T1: 8+57
     239 min ahead of schedule
     AC: ON
     Fuel Tank: 1/2 full
     Sched stop in apr 1h 5 m
     Sched end of day in apr 3 h 5 m

=================================================================

212 Cove 3+15 PM [Drive-through]

Five minutes after Vandervoort, and six minutes after Team 1 whistle through North Crossett, Team Two drive into the community of Cove.
.
360 people in 1.6 square miles – which is actually an extremely low density for a town. 95% of the population are White, 4% Native American, and 1% Hispanic or Latino. Which leaves the Black population lost in rounding errors, it is that low. Median age is 32, and there is something close to equality in gender. Per Capita income is $4000 less than the typical level even in these small towns, and 29% of the population are below the poverty line.

Cove is located at 1000ft above sea level in the hills of the Ouchita (“Waa-sheet-a”) Mountains. May, September and October are the most pleasant months, while July and January are the least comfortable months.

A post office was established in 1897. For about a year, it was known as Venuice, but the name Cove Station was chosen in 1898 (‘Leroy’ was also considered). The name was eventually shortened, and applied to the business communities that had sprung up around the railroad station, which was a mile from the previously-existing settlement; that is now known unofficially as “Old Cove”. As a result, Cove juts a finger almost all the way to the Oklahoma border. It now contains two grocery chain stores, a convenience store, a Mexican restaurant, a bank, a hardware store, and two automotive care businesses, one of which sells petrol. The post office, a popular series of hiking trails, and a Baptist church also continue to operate.

If it weren’t for it’s proximity to Zone Red, this community would deserve a far closer look than it is going to get under current circumstances – an insular community like “Old Cove” sounds like the perfect place to find what you’re looking for. But, under the circumstances, it doesn’t merit much of a first glance, never mind a second – you already have much better choices on your short list. Downtown Cove isn’t all that attractive (11-212f)

and it certainly doesn’t hold a candle to the Lake Cove Recreation Area and it’s many hiking trails and breathtaking views (11-212g)

T2: 9+3
     165 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: a little below 1/2 full
     Sched stop in apr 55 m
     Sched end of day in apr 2 h 55 m

=================================================================

212 Hatfield 3+19 PM [Drive-through]

Hatfield is just 4 minutes past Cove. The name immediately conjures up images of the notorious feud with the McCoys, (10-212h)

but you have no idea if the two are in any way connected. The population of =this= Hatfield is 410 and seems fairly stagnant and unlikely to change, from what you are reading. It’s another 96% White town, and that, in combination with the size and the proximity to Zone Red, makes worthwhile targets unlikely.

The town is contained within 1.3 sq miles at typical small-town population densities. The headquarters of the Christian Motorcyclists Association is located here, which is an interesting blend of conservative and radical – but suggests that less desirable blends of those traits might also find a home in these parts. Unwilling to waste time on so unlikely a prospect, you blow straight through town without stopping. Some of the views are pretty (10-212i),

…but that’s not enough to hang a base on.

T2: 9+8
     167 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: closer to 1/2 than 1/4 full
     Sched stop in apr 50 m
     Sched end of day in apr 2 h 50 m

=================================================================

109 Fountain Hill 3+21 [Drive-through]

The next event of note after we last looked in on Team One was arrival at Fountain Hill, one minute after Team 2 drove out of Hatfield.

Fountain Hill is a town of 159 people occupying 0.57 square miles (1.47 km²) that is reached by team one 11 minutes after leaving North Crossett. Team 2 are, at that moment, noticing that Mena is a great place to go antiquing.

60% of the residents of Fountain Hill are White, 35% Black and 2.5% are Latino/Hispanic. Median age is 39, and there are 85 males for every 100 women. 11% of the population live below the poverty line, and only 4% of the children, which is notably better than the Arkansas average. Joseph Jackson, father and manager of the Jacksons, was born here in 1928.

The town is so small (11-109a)

…that it doesn’t even have a speed limit until you reach the turn onto Highway 425, having driven along one complete side of it, but – being prudent – you nevertheless slow to a compromise speed of 60 mph. You reach the Highway, having completely traversed one side of this basically square-shaped town in just 18 seconds. Turning left, you see a speed limit sign restricting you to normal highway speeds (55 mph).

But you only have to travel on the highway for about 300 meters before you reach your turnoff to the left, a block after the Fountain Hill United Methodist Church on Mulberry St, which proves instantly recognizable, 13 seconds later (11-109b).

You actually get held up waiting for traffic coming the other way for longer than that!

That puts you onto Route 160, and crossing the town at an angle. 650m and 40-odd seconds or so later, you reach the University Pointe Apartments – a surprisingly unprepossessing collection of temporary buildings (11-109c)

– and can accelerate back up to 75 mph.

T1: 9+9
     253 min ahead of schedule
     AC: ON
     Fuel Tank: a whisker below 1/2 full
     Sched stop in apr 50 m
     Sched end of day in apr 2 h 50 m

=================================================================

212 Potter Junction 3+24 PM [Drive-through]

It takes a whole 6 minutes to reach Potter Junction, which is where the road from the nearby town of Potter joins the highway you’re on.

It is also known as Old Potter, and that name gives the history of the place – the railroad must have passed near here but not through here, and so the nearest railway station became the center of a new town, with everything that was here migrating to there. So that becomes Potter, and this, Old Potter – technically part of the same settlement, but in practice, it’s own unincorporated community. Located at 1030 feet above sea level, part of the hills of the Ouchita Mountains.

You slow for the speed limit through town even as Team one are driving around Crossett looking for landmarks, contenders, and just getting a feel for the place (11-212a).

Potter, according to your guidebook, has almost 900 citizens; so far as you can tell, Old Potter would struggle to hold a tenth of that.

But that doesn’t really matter, because from this point onwards, as you approach the more substantial community of Mena, the highway contains one roadside business after another. Eventually, Old Potter will become the Mena City Limits. But this is a conservative part of the world, so that might take a few decades. They are technically considered to be separate communities some five miles apart, but human nature and opportunism is no respecter of lines on a map.

First there’s the Fish Net Lodge, before you even get to Old Potter. Then the Creative Touch Florist, which is followed by the Loaves & Fishes Christian Book Shop, the Outback Barn (a barn construction company that is housed, appropriately enough, in a large barn), the Humane Society of the Ouchitas, Copelin Motors, Mena Feed & Supplies, The Pleasant Hills Animal Clinic, and then the official Mena city limits sign!

That is followed by the South 71 Church Of Christ, A&J Off road Rentals, the Polk City Fairgrounds, the Southside General Store, Architectural Salvage by Ri-Jo, and the Ozark Inn, all before you see any substantive difference between Old Potter and the city of Mena, all 200-400m apart.

Certainly, there was no change in the speed limit – and no prospective contenders, either.

T2: 9+12
     172 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: closer to 1/2 than to 1/4 full
     Sched stop in apr 50 m
     Sched end of day in apr 2 h 50 m

=================================================================

109 Johnsville 3+29 [Drive-through]

As Team Two approach the city of Mena, a little less than ten minutes after they departed Fountain Hill, Team One arrive in Johnsville.

To get into town, you actually have to drive past a sharpish right-hand turn in the road you’ve been following and then make an extremely tight right-hand turn back almost the way you came 250m or so later.

This unincorporated community in south-western Arkansas. It has not been included in any Census. It’s a very small town and has a very small population. They used to have 2 stores but now they only have one which is closed on Sunday. Throw in a single church, which is NOT closed on Sunday, a used car dealership, and a small takeaway, and you’ve reached the limits of interest this area holds.

When you get to the turnoff, you can already see that there’s nothing for you here, so you don’t bother, saving yourselves another minute against your timetable. (No Pics)

T1: 9+17
     262 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: between 1/2 and 1/4 full
     Sched stop in apr 45 m
     Sched end of day in apr 2 h 45 m

=================================================================

213 Mena 3+31 PM to 4+19 [Major Eval]

Two minutes after Team 1 leave Johnsville, Team 2 pull into Mena. This city’s shape is roughly circular, approx 1.5 miles in radius, with four protrusions sticking out – one along route 88 to the east, one along route 8, one alongside Polk Road 76 which runs parallel to route 88 north, and one, of course, along Highway 75. That means it takes about 7 minutes to traverse it – and it has a lot of streets to traverse in its official area of just under 7 square miles (18 square km)! So this might take a while.

Looking at a map of Mena and Surrounds, it’s obvious that there have been two phases of construction – the heart of the town is on a NW/SE orientation, while the outskirts and surrounding roads are on a north-south orientation (11-213a).

Of course, you’ve been in Mena unofficially for about 5 miles before you even reach this point – that’s so far to the SW that it won’t even fit on that map!

Mena is the county seat of Polk County, and is surrounded by the Ouchita (“Waa-sheet-a”) National Forest; it serves as the gateway to some of the most visited tourist attractions in Arkansas. It was founded by Arthur Edward Stilwell during the building of the Kansas-City,-Pittsburgh-and-Gulf Railroad (now the Kansas City Southern), which stretched from Kansas City in Missouri (NOT the state capital of Kansas) to Port Arthur, Texas. Train service to Mena began in 1896.

Like Vandervoort to the south, this was named for the wife of Jan De Goeijen, a friend of Stillwell, or more exactly, for Stillwell’s nickname for Folmina Margaretha Janssen-De Goeijen. Janssen Park, in the center of town is also named for her.

It took less than a year for Mena to become incorporated as a second-class city, and a year later, the Bank of Mena was founded. A year after that, the county seat was moved from nearby Dallas (not the one in Texas) to Mena. Two years later, the population was 3,423. In contrast, Dallas has never grown larger than an unincorporated community.

A black community called Little Africa developed on Board Camp Creek east of Mena. The community was small, with a population of 152 in 1900. In 1901, a black man, Peter Berryman, was lynched after an alleged altercation with a white girl. No one was arrested. Several other instances of racially motivated hate and violence toward the Black community have been noted; this, combined with declining job prospects, drove most Blacks to leave; by 1910, only 16 remained. Ten years after that, the Mena Star was advertising the town as “100% white”. A local chapter of the KKK was organized in 1922. Five years later, the Commercial Club Of Mena created advertising which used “No Negroes” as a selling point. Even today, the city has less than 0.5% Black residents.

In the 1950s, a government program to stockpile manganese led to the reopening of local mines closed since the 1890s. The program ended in 1959, and the mines again closed. Shortly afterwards, the USGS moved its regional headquarters to Union, where there was still actual mining in the vicinity that it might care about.

In the early 1980s, drug smuggler Barry Seal moved his operations to the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport, where he owned and operated many planes and helicopters, as well as advanced radar equipment. He was taken down last year by the Crusaders, in their third visit to the city. In 1985, they had ripped apart a White Pride gathering, demolishing the town convention center in the process, and in 1984, they attacked the 4th Of July Parade after a neo-nazi affiliated group, the Freedom Brigade, were granted permission to march. 87 were hospitalized, about 1/3 of whom were =not= part of the Freedom Brigade. While the first two actions won them few friends in the region, greater forgiveness was shown after the third. Not that there’s any evidence that they care.

In 1911, a damaging tornado struck the town. It typically snows 5 months of the year, though in three of those months the average amount is 0.2 inches. In the summer months, the average temperature is in the low 90s(F) (33C).

There are currently about 5250 citizens. With such a large population base, broader statistical determinants wash out much demographic individuality; median age is a little high (41 years) but otherwise the population is right on the state statistical medium.

An estimated 1.2 million visitors a year come to Mena to enjoy its nearby natural features which include a scenic drive and state park. Camp Pioneer is a 163-acre Boy Scout camp east of Mena, and Camp High Point is a Girl Scout camp also located in the area.

Population density is relatively low, about midway between a small town and a densely-packed city like Texarcana.

The only indication that you’re entering Mena is that the speed limit drops from 55 to 45 mph. (11-213b)

EVALUATION:
The problem with vital, active communities is that available properties get snapped up fairly quickly. In effect, they are all desirable real estate, only the degree of desirability varying. And there are locals with the money to snap up anything desirable. Combine that with the proximity of Zone Red, and it would be easy to vacillate between abject pessimism and wild-eyed optimism. Still, it wouldn’t be fair to either yourselves or the city of Mena not to give it a thorough evaluation. As usual, you start downtown, getting a feel for the prosperity of the location – and eyeballing the windows of every real estate agency you pass. Mena looks fairly unremarkable at first (11-213c). (3 mins)

It’s only when you discover two antique shops side-by-side that you begin to appreciate that Mena has qualities unlike everywhere else you’ve looked (11-213d). (4 mins)

Mena appears to have an upper class who are seriously interested in the finer things in life. The Arts shop just down the road would be remarkable in any city for its size, but when you put still another antiques dealer right next door, it establishes a pattern (11-213e). (5 mins)

The first church that you come across is tidy and unspectacular, suggesting that the community are more secular than most (11-213f). (7 mins)

But the next one is far more lavish in scale and decoration (11-213g)… (10 mins)

…and the third one is positively opulent, even architecturally grand, more deserving of the title “Temple” than mere “Church” (11-213h). (12 mins)

Still, this fits the pattern that you have begun to detect – there are people with money here, and they aren’t afraid to show it – but at the same time, utility is not something they willingly sacrifice for appearances. The County Court House is neat, tidy, utilitarian, but with a couple of almost understated artistic flourishes, like the decorative band around the second story ceiling (11-213i). (14 mins)

It’s a similar story when you come across the National Guard Armory – initially rather plain, but the more time you spend looking at it, the more expensive it begins to seem as small stylish design flourishes begin to accumulate (11-213j). (16 mins)

.It is into this context that you start your search for potential Bases. Some of the houses on the outskirts, where you hoped land would be cheap enough that someone would build big, are rustic cabins (but the vehicles on display still hint at wealth) (11-213k). (19 mins)

But most are neat and tidy, if small – and way too small for your purposes (11-213L). (22 mins)

Even when you find a bigger house, closer inspection inevitably shows that this simply means that the bedrooms are bigger, not that there are more of them (11-213m). (26 mins)

Some carry even this trend to extremes like this one-bedroom offering (11-213n). (30 mins)

There are a few larger buildings, but they are not available – for example, the Elks Lodge, which was lent to the community to serve as the local hospital between 1935 and 1951, but was then handed back to the local chapter of the Elks (11-213o). (33 mins)

For any who don’t know, the Elks started as a social club in 1868 for minstrel show performers, and borrowed rites and practices from Freemasonry, including racial and gender restrictions on membership. The former lasted until 1973, the latter continues to this day. Over time, they became the socially-acceptable face of right-wing ultra-patriotism. They have participated in a number of national programs of civic benefit over the years, in a similar fashion to the Rotary Club. Presidents Harding, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Ford were all Elks members, as were General Douglas MacArthur, General Frederick Funston, General Patton, and General Pershing. Other famous Elks include Lawrence Welk, Will Rogers, Jack Benny, Clint Eastwood, Gene Autry, William F Cody (aka Buffalo Bill), Buster Keaton, Vince Lombardi, Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, and Irving Berlin.

Also not available are this magnificent Victorian home, recently restored (11-213p)… (36 mins)

…and this more modern offering (11-213q)… (40 mins)

…or this privately-owned mansion (11-213r). (42 mins)

VERDICT:
Ultimately, Mena was another dry well, but it helped crystallize in your minds the observation that there was a demographic ‘sweet spot’ that optimized the prospects of both a location of sufficient size having been built, and being on the market, and of sufficiently-recent maintenance and circumstances that it would be a viable choice. Every one of those failures just underlined that the right place IS out there, waiting to be found. If it hasn’t been, already! Besides, there is always the proximity of Zone Red and the activities of the Crusaders to consider – that alone is enough to put even a perfect choice onto shaky ground.

EVALUATION REDUX:
But Mena has one more surprise to spring. Just after crossing the city limits (11-213s)… (43 mins)

…you find this former sawmill, which has been fully converted into a large home, ten upstairs bedrooms and several big rooms – a kitchen, a dining room, a sunken open-plan living room, a spa, four bathrooms. Fully furnished, and on offer for just $880,000, it’s a few miles out of Mena, and extremely isolated – maybe even isolated enough that you could ignore all the Zone Red down-checks (11-213t). (48 mins)

VERDICT REDUX:
It’s not quite perfect, for that reason, but it’s at least the equal of anything else you’ve seen, even with the prominent negatives that come with the location. And one final thought: In their real superhero identities, the team are well known to have inclinations toward small-l liberalism; while this set of identities have yet to establish a reputation, this is quite possibly the LAST place on earth that one would expect to find a pro-liberal superhero team. It’s just one more layer of protection for your assumed identities. And that might just be worth the risk of the Crusaders coming back to town. A 5 out of 5 – if the Crusaders Question is disregarded. And where there’s one, there are almost certain to be others to find – perhaps without that drawback! You still have several more states, and more than half of this one, to explore!

T2: 9+20
     173 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: between 1/2 and 1/4 full
     Sched stop in apr 40 m
     Sched end of day in apr 2 h 40 m

Directions: Route 88 East then Highway 71 North to Acorn (total 5.4 miles), then Highway 270 East, North, WNW, NE (15.3 miles) to Y City. The road skirts through a valley between two mountain ranges of the Ouchitas.

     0.4 miles exit Mena @ 35 mph
     5.4 miles to Acorn @ 55 mph
          Acorn ETA 9+59

     0.5 miles through Acorn @ 45 mph = 1 min
     15.2 miles to Y City @ 55mph = 17 min
     Turn right onto Highway 270
          Y City ETA 10+20

=================================================================

110 Warren 3+41 PM (T2 10 into Mena) to 5+8 [Major Eval]

NARRATIVE / CONCORDANCE:
Team 2 are looking at the second church in Mena when Team 1 approach a more serious stop of their own, the city of Warren. As your car gently brakes to urban speeds, you can start looking around. Warren’s size is such that it takes about 7½ minutes to drive from one side of it to the other – plus 3-to-6 minutes at traffic signals. Your immediate priority in terms of an efficient search is to face each traffic signal no more than once, but even so, this is likely to be another extended evaluation.

GUIDEBOOK:
The Guidebook entry for Warren has told you that the city is located in northeast Bradley County on high ground 2 miles (3 km) west of the Saline River, a tributary of the Ouchita (“Waa-sheet-a”) River. It is a city of 7000 occupying 7.07 sqr miles of land.

Although the area had been settled by European-Americans for approximately thirty years, the city itself was not incorporated until 1851. Tradition says the city is named after a former slave, freed by Captain Hugh Bradley, the namesake of the county and leader of the main early settlement party which established the city.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Warren found itself in the middle of a boom in the timber industry, a resource which continues to be important to the city’s economy, although the lumber yards that were central to Warren’s prosperity are no longer in operation.

The city’s Victorian-era courthouse was originally built in 1903 and still maintains the exterior character with which it was constructed, even though the interior has been completely modernized and the building was half-razed during Ragnarok.

The climate in this area is characterized by hot, humid summers and generally mild to cool winters. Tornado strikes have occurred on at least two occasions. The first was on January 3, 1949, killing 55 people and injuring 435. On March 28, 1975, another tornado killed seven people and injured 51. Both were rated F4; the decrease in toll of the second is attributed to better meteorological and communications equipment, which yielded a whole seven minutes of warning.

The Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival is held yearly, normally the second week of June, and is one of Arkansas’ longest-running annual community festivals. The festival celebrates the South Arkansas Vine-Ripe Pink Tomato, a special variety of tomato grown nowhere else which holds the distinction of being both Arkansas’ state fruit =and= its state vegetable.

Warren High School’s athletic emblem and mascot is The Fightin’ Lumberjacks. Warren claimed the state championship in Basketball in 1931 but has not achieved significantly since, a sore spot on the local ego. This is predominantly thought to be a problem of funding that came to a head in the 1982 mayoral elections and became a hot-button issue.

As a result, it is felt that this issue will =finally= be addressed, and it is popularly expected that within a decade, the current investment in training and facilities will lead to the city establishing a rich sporting heritage. Certainly, maintaining the current levels of investment has been a key platform in campaigning this year, and should there not be clear signs of progress in the next five or six years, public dissatisfaction with the current conservative government is likely to become palpable; nowhere else in the country are the fortunes of the political mood so closely tied to sporting achievement.

The median age is 39 and there are 81 adult males for every 100 women.

EVALUATION:
You weren’t too surprised that the mountainous areas of the north-western part of the state were green and leafy – trees =like= those conditions. But the south of the state has so far proven a revelation – neither as redneck as you feared, and far more comfortable as a place to live than you expected. Warren is just another example (12-110a). (1 min)

You also note that – as has been a pattern elsewhere in Southern Arkansas – fences are something of a rarity. Right away, Warren seems an interesting and deliberate blending of the traditional and the modern. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the locals think of the traditional as having an intrinsic value that can be harnessed to compliment modern functionality. The court-house is typical of this attitude – historic landmark on the outside (and perfectly restored, where necessary) and ultra-modern where it counts (12-110b). (5 mins)

The Bradley County Prison, which also houses the Warren Police Department, is all business, and gives the impression of being cutting-edge and no-expense-spared – but the wooden doors appear constructed of antique timbers (12-110c)… (8 mins)

…and there is an undeniable sense of style to the Branch Library that is both intriguing and enticing (12-110d). (12 mins)

You find the same principle embedded in building after building. The Bank of Warren, complete with a lone angel keeping watch from above, is still another example of the blending of traditional style with modern functionality (12-110e). (22 mins)

Quite often, churches starve the community of funds. You can tell a lot about a town by examining the places of worship, you have discovered. Not quite sure what to expect, you are surprised by the first church you examine – St Luke’s Catholic Church. Small, utilitarian, and even plain compared even tot he house next door, it bears the scars of its post-Ragnarok repairs openly – look above and to the right of the stained-glass window (12-110f). (26 mins)

The New Zion Church takes this philosophy to an extreme. Plain to the point of being spartan, first glance suggests that the place is decaying and still exhibits the wounds sustained in the fireball bombardment of Ragnarok (look at the round window), and the obvious repairs to the front wall at ceiling height and the join to the tower to the left (12-110g)… (32 mins)

…but closer inspection shows that the damage has been carefully preserved while the structure itself has been repaired and reinforced. The population of Warren seem to embrace the fact that Ragnarok actually happened, and isn’t to be wallpapered over, in a way that you’ve rarely seen anywhere in the world. That’s not to say that they can’t do Majesty when that’s the brief, just that they put it in it’s place – as evidenced by the First Baptist Church of Warren, which is grand architecture on one side, and a public playground and soup kitchen on the other, with a sign that reads “All Welcome – no church attendance necessary” (12-110h) (37 mins)

CONTENDER #1
All this raises expectations and obvious concerns as you start poking around the property market. Surviving old houses tend to be either tiny or huge, and the respect for the traditional suggests that this might be a target-rich environment. The principle of repairing and refurbishing with ‘state of the art technology where it won’t detract from the historic value’ suggests that many buildings that would be rotting hulks in other towns will be not just habitable but exquisite, and ready to occupy – so what contenders you find should be quite highly-rated. But that also increases their desirability to others, suggesting that there might be rather fewer of them on the market than you would hope. The first contender to come to your attention is this very traditional four-story mansion named “The Bailley House”, which has just been freshly repaired and boasts satellite-TV, air conditioning, ducted-floor heating, a BBQ pit and a heated swimming pool – and a real estate agent posting a “SOLD” notice over the “For Sale” sign (12-110i). (40 mins)

CONTENDER #2
is another historic building, The Ederington House (known locally as ‘The E House’). It is located on the main street of central Warren, and its fence bears a sign (not visible in this photograph) stating that it has been granted it’s own listing on the register of historic landmarks. The building was designed by a local architect who went on to statewide fame, and employs deliberate asymmetry to create the impression that it is much larger than it actually is, both externally and internally. The trees are a deliberate architectural feature, designed to ensure that the corners of the structure cannot be seen, further reinforcing the effect. Unfortunately, while signs suggest that the E House was on the sales register recently, contracts were exchanged a couple of weeks ago according to the notices pasted over those signs (12-110j). (44 mins)

CONTENDER #3
is another recently-refurbished house in Green and White, also located on Main Street. It’s been a long time since you saw bars on windows purely for decorative effect, and yet, they work. While the main building is only six-bedroom, just barely big enough, the sign out front states that this comes complete with a 6,000 square-foot 14-bed nuclear bomb shelter, fully supplied for a five year emergency. For comparison, a typical modern 3-bedroom house, with 2.5 bathrooms, is 2,000 square feet. So the shelter would have 7 residential rooms in a space large enough for nine, but would be designed to accommodate two people to a room. That means that if you have guests, you can hide them underground, literally! If the builder knows what he’s doing, you would not expect this place to come cheap, and at 950K, it doesn’t – but you would be getting a lot of property for your money (12-110k). (48 mins)

CONTENDER #4
at first looks big enough, and very tastefully incorporates the stone front wall of the original house on the lot with a completely modern house built in a traditional style – but it’s “only” a five-bedroom, according to the fine print on the for-sale sign (12-110L), and the building seems to be a lot more shallow than you would expect. (55 mins)

CONTENDER #5
is the exact opposite – an old building on Myrtle Street that’s been refurbished and extended, it’s described as a twelve-bedroom two-story dwelling that would suit sub-letting or could function as a bed-and-breakfast. While the building looks adequate for an eight-bedroom dwelling, squeezing those extra 4 bedrooms in has to mean that the rooms are comparatively small, perhaps the right size for university student dorm-rooms (12-110m). (58 mins)

CONTENDER #6
is of ample size, with no less than 19 bedrooms listed – but this is a building that has yet to be restored, one of the few. Its downstairs windows are boarded up, and so is the patio beneath the master bedroom, which gives the distinct impression of being tacked on as an afterthought. According to the sign that’s just barely visible, there is to be a public auction in a week’s time. Based on the current condition and the likely valuation once ‘enhanced’ in the Warren style, you would expect no shortage of bidders, so this is probably too expensive for you – and is definitely far too public. But it would be interesting to come back in five years and see what’s become of the place (12-110n). (62 mins)

CONTENDER #7
is a very interesting option – the former home of Orval Faubus, the 36th Governor of the state of Arkansas (12-110o).

Faubus is notorious now for refusing to comply with the unanimous decision of the Federal Court in the 1954 case Brown v. Board Of Education which ended segregation in schools, ordering the National Guard to prevent black students from attending Little Rock Central High School, an event now known as the Little Rock Crisis. It led to a number of confrontations with the Federal Government of Eisenhower, in which Faubus become one of the most controversial political figures in the US, loved or hated in equal measure. Eisenhower stripped the Governor of control of the National Guard and sent in the 101st Airborne to enforce desegregation; in response, Forbus closed all Little Rock schools for the the 1958-1959 school year, which is now known as “The Lost Year” in Little Rock. Nevertheless, he was elected to no less than six two-year terms in the position, five of them after the Little Rock Crisis. He was nominated to contest the Presidential Primaries against his will in 1960, he refused to campaign and lost the nomination with only 0.7% of the vote, and two of his six terms as governor followed. In 1966, he decided not to contest what would have been a difficult race for a seventh term. In 1968, he was one of five democrats considered to be the running mate of presidential candidate George Wallace, but was not chosen. This seemed to reawaken the political fire in the man, who subsequently tried and failed to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for Governor in the 1970 and 1974 elections. Forbus’ political decline occurred when the Democrats reformed their own party in response to public acceptance of the progressive policies followed by Rockefeller. There were even rumors that Faubus had been approached by the Republicans to run as Governor on their ticket in 1976, and although this was denied by all concerned, it shows how far the Democratic party had drifted from Faubus. Faubus is also well-known for moving house every two years except when in gubernatorial office, and for remaking his properties into as close a resemblance to the Governor’s Mansion as possible..

…Which brings us back to this house in Warren (12-110o).

It LOOKS like a governor’s mansion, with it’s four white marble pillars and both the national and state flags above the door. Despite appearances, you would expect that this place has a lot of security features that won’t be immediately obvious – for example, the shutters are probably steel, bulletproof, and motorized to all snap shut at the flick of a switch. The glass is likely to be tempered and thicker on one side than the other so that objects (and people) in a room aren’t quite where they appear to be from the outside, and so on. The asking price is high, at $1.65 million, but might still represent value for money. But is the extra security worth the extra scrutiny that would result from buying such a high-profile property? (65 mins)

VERDICTS:
#1 is no longer available – if the purchase doesn’t fall through. But you can’t count on that.

#2 is no longer available. If there was going to be a problem with the purchase, it would have happened by now – or it will happen quite some time from now, when the bank forecloses.

#3 is a viable candidate, in particular because there’s probably all sorts of hidden touches that can be exploited – a tunnel from the main house to the bomb shelter, for example. On the other hand, until you uncover them, they could also be considered security vulnerabilities. No more than a 4-to-4½ out of five, as a result.

#4 isn’t big enough internally – or rather, the rooms are too big, internally.

#5 ticks all the boxes – but the number of bedrooms crammed in is less than desirable. Which means that it doesn’t rate especially highly – and that means that you’ve seen better choices. A two out of 5.

#6 has bucket-loads of space and it’s raining potential in the vicinity. It’s far too publicity-exposed and under-ready for your needs, though – a 1 out of 5.

#7 is tempting. Central location, fully furnished, huge, added security features – but there would be a short-term publicity exposure. But it’s an interesting option, and worth at least a 4 out of 5.

By the time you have finished exploring Warren, the time for a rest break has come and gone. Belatedly, you get out and stretch your legs.

*** If Basalt turned the driving duties over to Zantar, tell him that Zantar’s driving style has given you several heart-stopping moments over the last few hours; he seems incapable of recognizing that the other lane of a two-lane highway is reserved for traffic going the other way, and is adept at not changing lanes until the last possible second. While there is no denying his reflexes, cultural issues – like the accelerator having more positions than off and hard down, and the significance of red lights, and giving way to emergency vehicles with their sirens sounding – remain a challenge for the Kzin. Basically, he has no knowledge of, nor respect for, the rules of the road that you would need to know in order to pass a driving test. You have recovered from your six-hour stint and feel more than adequate to take the wheel for the final leg of the day.

*** If he did not: Zantar renews his offer to take the wheel for the last stint.

T1: 10+49
     274 min ahead of schedule
     AC: on in urban environments
     Fuel Tank: between 1/4 full and empty
     Sched end of day in apr 1 h 10 m

Directions: NW via New Edinburg to Fordyce

     2.2 miles @ 23.5 mph = 5.6 mins
     13 miles @ 95 mph = 8.2 mins
          New Edinburg ETA 10+54

     0.6 miles @ 60 mph = 0.6 min
     10.5 miles @ 90 mph = 7 min
          Fordyce ETA 11+2

So, here we are at the end of our epic journey, at least for now. I thought that I would close with one final tip for handling synopses:

You may have noticed that even when material recurs from one to the next, I don’t just copy and paste, I take the time and trouble to rewrite, highlighting different aspects of what was experienced. This isn’t just a convenience for readers; when you hear (or read) the same thing time and again, there’s a tendency to tune it out. Rephrasing, rewriting in this way, keeps the important information fresh in players minds, and in my mind as I prepare to GM the next game session.

The great advantage of summation and compression is that it leaves things out (by design and definition) – which has the side-benefit of permitting such different ‘slants’ on the material instead of letting it – and those experiencing it – get rusty.

Why are dystopian settings so popular? Is that a good thing? What are the consequences and what are the alternatives?

Another relatively short post this week (in theory, if all goes according to plan), because this approach worked so well for me last week – I had time to get more than 16000 words of part 3 of the “Long Road” trilogy done after finishing the piece on Layering Encounter Depth. Not sure that I’ll have as much time left after this one, but I’ll find out! EDIT – actually, it came out as fairly average for a Campaign Mastery article. Oh well. I still had time to add another 9500 words to the ongoing “Long Road” article.

The other week, in passing, I spotted a question on Quora asking why Dystopias were so popular as settings.

While the question probably referred principally to computer games, movies, or TV shows, there are aspects of TTRPGs to which it would also be a fair question.

So, why are Dystopias so popular, is that a good thing, and what are the alternatives?

Popularity

I dislike attempting to read the collective minds of a marketplace. My perspective is not the same as that of someone living in New York City – or in Macon, Georgia, or Edinburgh for that matter, and presuming to speak for the entirety of popular culture is a surefire recipe for sparking disagreements. On top of that, the question will have been distorted all out of shape by the event of a once-a-century Pandemic.

Nevertheless, I have identified eight reasons which, singly or in combination, explain (in my mind, and outside of Pandemic considerations) why Dystopian settings are relatively ubiquitous in popular culture. These are of varying worth as a source of creative inspiration and may be of variable strength in assessing any individual work, setting, or individual reaction to same. There may be others beyond those that I have identified; I’m not trying to answer conclusively, but just hoping that I’ve picked up on the major contributing factors.

1. Reflected Reality

It’s a fact that infrastructure built in the early- and mid-twentieth century – both social and physical – is suffering from neglect to the point of crumbling down around us. For the first time in a century or more, the current generation of young adults were facing the prospect of a lower standard of living across the totality of their lifetimes than that enjoyed by their parents and grandparents.

Realism (or hyper-realism) and the need to connect with the lived experiences of ordinary people in order to make an entertainment enjoyable and relatable mandate that this reality be reflected in the content of that entertainment, and this is true regardless of the medium, be that RPG, Computer Game, Movie, TV show, or literary work. Such reflections of experienced reality are essential to the suspension of disbelief, or so the theory goes.

Even the current and ongoing existential philosophic war over Climate Change can be viewed through this prism. I’m personally still not convinced by the science, but regard the potential price of inaction to be so great that we can’t neglect the dangers and need to take immediate action. Some of that hesitancy is the result of the many many times ‘the end of life as we know it’ has been forecast and failed to materialize – everything from the Hole in the ozone layer through to the planetary alignment in the 1970s and the Aztec Calendar. The boys have cried ‘wolf’ several times too often. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if climatic change is man-made or a natural evolution with a man-made contribution on the top – the reality of change needs to be accommodated by society and whatever mitigating influence we can exert is necessary to combat the effect. If it is the result of human activity – something I don’t rule out – so much the better, because it indicates that the solution also lies within our hands, as a species and a global society. But all that’s strictly a personal opinion.

2. Pessimism

Confronted with such challenges, it’s easy to be pessimistic, especially in comparison to the naive optimism of the 1950s and 1960s. The social and environmental hurdles we face as a species sometimes seem insoluble, especially when there are those who are happy to make the problems worse in the cause of corporate greed.

It’s a short step from being pessimistic about the future to manifesting such a future in the setting of entertainments.

3. Potential

It’s also important to be honest – there is, in general terms, a lot more story potential in everything falling apart than in everything being sweetness and light. This is why the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation fell flat in a number of key respects – the absence of conflict, in good cause, between the protagonists presented an oversimplified society which felt like a fairy-tale reality, as fragile as spun glass. Where were the conflicting priorities? The slippery slope full of good intentions? The outright mistakes and missteps The flawed assumptions? The absence of these things seemed to reflect a radical reinvention or even denial of fundamental human nature. Not even the original series went so far, and it was only when human nature was reasserted that the series popularity grew beyond basic in-principle enthusiasm. Dramatic conflict, even melodramatic conflict, is at the heart of most RPGs and modern entertainments.

4. Weight & Depth

It’s a lot easier to demonstrate that you are taking something seriously with darkness than with light. Or, to put it another way, it’s easier to appear to be tackling a serious subject with grim seriousness than with glib lightness that seems vacuous in comparison.

5. Permissiveness

I’m sure, too, that some of the appeal lies in the unfettering of choices of action. The restrictions that bind society together in less dystopian settings function by taking certain choices off the table on moral grounds. In a nutshell, you can get away with more in a dystopian setting, and that can be cathartic

This is the fountainhead that produces Murder Hobo campaigns, amongst others. It is also why the darker visions of The Dark Knight were so popular, and why there was an appeal to infusing that darkness into Star Trek (with the franchise reboots) and Star Wars (with the modern sequels) and Superman (with the Cavill reboots) – and, paradoxically, why the latter were not accepted by audiences; Superman was supposed to be an ideal, an expression of hope, and it was felt that those ideals were tarnished by the dystopian grim-and-gritty take on the man of steel.

6. The Cautionary Tale

Exposing the fragility of the world that a lot of us take for granted has yielded dystopias from War Of The Worlds to the Matrix to Terminator to Aliens. Cautionary Tales have been fertile ground for Science Fiction practically from Word One. There has not been as great a presence of the Cautionary Tale in fantasy, though even there, examples can be found; this rarity surprises me somewhat as Fantasy offers the opportunity to examine social issues divorced from questions of, and the role of, technology.

Some of the most popular entertainments of the 20th century have been, or can be interpreted as, Cautionary Tales – from Robocop to The 6th Day, to Outbreak, to Total Recall. Even Age Of Ultron and X-men can be viewed in this light.

Initially a motivation for the creator to make his setting a Dystopia, the existence of the Cautionary Tale then justifies the Dystopian trappings to the audience – no Dystopia, no Cautionary Tale.

7. Dark Is A Color, Too

Grim and Gritty have always had their place. Arguably, even many of the American Pulp adventures with their hard-boiled detectives and sinister underworlds can be viewed as Dystopian Expressions, a manifestation of the harsh realities of the Prohibition era. Even more strongly representative of this theme are the Gangster movies of the period.

There are some stories which will inevitably work better in a Dystopian setting, just as there are stories that inherently carry Dystopian overtones. Artistic exploration of the darker side of the moral palette is a perfectly viable and reasonable justification for a Dystopian setting.

The Matrix is inherently Dystopian. The Truman show can be seen as its Utopian counterpart – both portray their protagonists as becoming aware of a Darker reality outside of their everyday experiences in a constructed fantasy environment.

8. Laziness

Such stories are generally exceptions, however. More often, the darkness of the Dystopian setting feels tacked on, an attempt to impart existential credibility at the expense of entertainment – lazy writing, in other words.

This is, by far, the least acceptable justification for a Dystopian setting.

And sometimes, the reason for audience acceptance of a Dystopian form of entertainment or setting is simply because that’s what has been offered. That’s laziness of a different sort, but no more acceptable as a justification.

The Lessons Learned

Those eight reasons, of differing levels of validity, are the justifications that can underlie the choice of a dystopian setting, and its acceptance or even popularity. Personally, I always feel like its not the setting that is popular or unpopular, it’s the story that takes place within that setting; a great setting with a poorly-conceived or poorly-executed story will never be as successful as a great story in a poorly-conceived or poorly-executed setting – and, to hit a home run, everything needs to be in sync.

The clear implication is that sometimes, a Dystopian setting is an enhancement, and sometimes it’s a detraction. A great setting needs both dark corners and deep shadows in well-lit areas.

But that’s all very generic and general; are there any specific factors that can be pointed at in an attempt to answer my second question – is the ubiquity of Dystopian Settings a good thing?

Darkening Days

One point that was teased in the preceding discussion is, to what extent are Dystopian Settings a reflection of living in an increasingly Dystopian world in real life?

It’s a known and observed fact Heavy Metal rises in popularity in times of despair, struggle, and economic strife. These are loud, angry, and aggressive – cathartic venting of frustration and despair.

Dystopian settings offer an opportunity to do just that in a different medium.

It has to be accepted that in dark times, dark tones can provide a safety valve for some, and to that extent, the popularity of Dystopian settings can be a good thing.

More often, though, the darkness without can feed and exacerbate the darkness within. Depression opens the door to acts both self-destructive and harmful to others, and being already predisposed to depressive states can make you more vulnerable to the negatives at the heart of Dystopian settings. This is, unquestionably, a negative outcome, and – for all that it may be more rare than the venting – it can be argued that the consequential manifestations are more harmful overall than the positive gains.

This highlights that there is an environmental factor at work: Dystopian Tales are arguably at their worst in terms of community and social good in times that are already dark and gloomy, but that in times of optimism, they can highlight and accentuate the positives. It is also arguable that these are the times when such entertainments are at their least popular, though.

Pessimism to the contrary

Others find equal or greater value in counterbalancing dark times with hope and optimism. This is the complete converse of the impact described in the previous section, and the same environmental considerations are at play here, too – during dystopian times, people need expressions of hope and victory over problems more than at any other time.

As an antidote to the pessimism ingrained within Dystopian Times, Utopian themes of hope are potentially powerful, and this argues that Dystopian settings are not so much enthusiastically supported as tolerated, especially when times are bad. Creators may have valid artistic motivations in creating Dystopian settings for their entertainments, but those motives are rendered almost irrelevant in this context, which paints Dystopias as an unquestionably bad thing, overall, that can sometimes be tolerated – no matter how popular they may be in the context of the times.

Hang Us All, Separately

There is an argument that Dystopias are essentially about the individual verses the world around them, while Utopias are more about mutual support and collaboration. I’m not convinced that this is the whole story – it’s very rare for a protagonist to have to go it completely alone; even if they are the spearhead, there is normally a supporting mechanism or group in back of them, so much so that the absence of such only makes their efforts to resist the impact of the Dystopian setting all the more heroic.

The same pattern can be observed in real life – during hard times, there is a natural tendency on the part of society as a whole to either come together or become insular and self-absorbed, and the former is celebrated even when the latter may be respected.

One of the great strengths about Australian culture is the way we come together in times of trouble – natural disasters and the like. Even the ‘greed is good’ eighties couldn’t erase that propensity (though it surely tried); even today, in large part, those seen as obstructing such collective efforts (or worse, trying to take advantage of them) are characterized as “rat-bags” at the very least.

Dystopian settings undermine such unity with the inherent pessimism that they contain. The subtext is that such efforts are doomed to failure, so why bother? Look out for #1, instead. The inevitable outcome of this attitude is one in which personal responsibility is completely undermined by personal liberty, as has been amply demonstrated in some parts of the US in response to the pandemic. To be fair, there are other factors at play in that situation, so it’s unfair to lay the blame entirely at the door of the Dystopian trend in entertainment – but even if only some small part of the responsibility for that problem can be attributed to this cause, it’s an entirely unacceptable price to pay.

This line of argument leaves no doubt that the popularity of Dystopian settings is a ‘bad thing’ even if they are only a reflection of such attitudes and not a driver of them.

Overall, the collective picture that emerges is one in which Dystopian settings can be valuable, in moderation, ubiquitous Dystopian settings and stories are at best only tolerable in inverse measure to their reflected social situation around them. Whatever minor non-artistic merits they may have are solidly counter-balanced by non-artistic downsides. The issue, then, is one (as always) of balancing the artistic merits with the non-artistic downsides; it is no better to look at life through rose-colored glasses.

It is this assessment that leads me to that strong condemnation of Dystopia through laziness or simply because it’s popular with which I concluded the first section.

And that leads me to the part of this analysis that will hopefully be of greatest benefit to readers – a broad exploration of some of the alternatives.

Alternatives through Dystopian Dynamics

In particular, as a starting point, it leads me back to the basics of drama, and to The Truman Show as evidence that a Dystopian setting (with all its implied pessimism and hopelessness) isn’t necessary to the exploration of dystopian concepts and themes. In fact, there are six alternative structures to consider – and if it is accepted that some stories are better served with a Dystopian setting and structure, then it also has to be accepted that one of these might be better suited to both the times we live in and the stories that we, as GMs, want our players to participate in.

A. Descent Into Darkness

Instead of a Dystopia-in-place, tell the story of the slide into darkness, with the PCs fighting to preserve honor and personal integrity and other virtues. The problems may ultimately prove too vast for them, but they can be a beacon of hope that things will get better. And if the campaign runs for long enough, they may attract enough people of like mind to begin a cultural counter-movement, and actually climb back out the other side.

Endings matter a lot in this sort of campaign – simple retirement with sanity restored to the world lacks the sharp punctuation. Most creators opt for pathos – the PCs achieve their goals but most never get to enjoy the fruits of their labors, paying the ultimate price to get over the finish line – or for hints that the darkness is still out there, physically or metaphysically, and looking for a way back in.

But there are other choices as well; not all of them will work with every campaign. Another popular choice is the protagonist who is forced to accept a job that he doesn’t want to do because he’s the only one the rest of the ‘world’ trusts enough to do the job. One variation that I have used is to find a way to let the bad guys win while transforming them enough that they are no longer bad guys. They might not be perfect, they might still have feet of clay, but they are sufficiently redeemed that the ‘defeat’ becomes a victory.

So think very carefully about the ending you want and begin laying the groundwork for that outcome and a satisfactory resolution of the campaign long before you get there.

B. Climbing The Mountain

This starts with the Dystopia in place and tells the tale of how the world emerged from the dark times. It’s like the second half of the proposed Descent Into Darkness campaign described above. It’s often a greater challenge because if society has yet to fall into Dystopia, you have the capacity to make preparations for the future; if society has already fallen, you are starting from nothing.

This imparts quite a different flavor to the campaign. Early on, it’s all about survival, and desperation, and potentially not a lot of fun – and the GM will have to remedy that, and find or instill the entertainment value in the setting.

The Matrix and The Running Man are both examples of this kind of story. In the beginning, the Dystopia is entrenched, and potentially even hidden from view. Once it is revealed, and challenged, it will attempt to crush the upstarts – so this phase of the campaign would be all about survival. But little-by-little, resources would be gathered that makes survival easier and presents opportunities to strike back, and ultimately, to overthrow or overcome the forces creating the Dystopia.

Unlike the previous version, this naturally lends itself to a climatic battle at the end, with the characters becoming symbolic but physical manifestations of the greater social forces at play.

C. Flirting With Danger

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. it is sometimes said. This can be a campaign without villains, in which everyone is trying to do the right thing – but methods and objectives clash, and there is no consensus as to what the right thing is. There may be no villains, but there are enemies.

This is neither Utopia nor Dystopia – but attempts to achieve the former leave open the danger of the latter. There is usually some concrete manifestation of the danger in question – but that is ultimately just a representative symbol.

If you then one or two actual villains into the mix, the odds of Dystopia go way up – but as a counterbalance, you have also introduced the PCs. And suddenly, the choice is theirs – they can choose to shoot for the stars (Utopia) but only if they are willing to risk complete failure (Dystopia) – or they can simply aim to preserve the status quo and leave it up to others, who may be less qualified, to make the bigger decisions.

D. Muddling Through

Most of the time, the real world is neither Utopia nor Dystopia (though it may occasionally take steps in one direction or the other), and the ultimate questions never get asked and are never in a position to be answered. Progress comes from the tension between the two – between business aimed at profiting at the expense of others and the individual, the maverick, and the good aimed at helping others. The big issues are too big to be resolved; all you can do is make sense of the chaos immediately around you and do the best that you can.

The West Wing is that sort of show. The goal is never to reform the world and make everything sweetness and light; it’s to leave the scene, when your time is up, a better place than you found it.

Taking the existential issues out of the equation also takes the extremes off the table, and that can be a good thing, because they tend to dominate whenever they are part of the picture.

E. Utopia: The Challenge

If Dystopias lend themselves to lazy writing, Utopias must represent the hardest challenge for a GM or writer – how to make life / the game interesting in such a setting?

The answer is that there must be 1000 different ways that the setting can fall from grace, and it’s the PCs job to stop any of them from happening.

Utopia is often a double-edged sword; maintaining it strips a lot of power and choice from the hands of those who could use them, or abuse them. Protecting the rights of the individual, for example, would require strict rules and adherence to procedures for obtaining limited scope for infringing on those rights. This is often the world of the police procedural.

F. “And I wanna know, who’s responsible?”

There is a seeming utopia in this concept, but it is flawed in ways that are not immediately evident. The PCs start uncovering those flaws, and this puts them at the heart of the moral dilemma – reveal the truth, ruining life for endless others who can’t do anything about it, or find the agency – be it person or corporation or government, who through malice or mistake, have brought the snake into paradise. In other words, there is an apparent utopia but there are dystopian cracks in the facade, and the PCs can either widen those cracks or wallpaper over them.

An uncertain Premise

It may be a little late to admit this, but I’m still not 100% convinced of the premise. Certainly, you can look at any action film, select the part where the hero(es) are at their lowest ebb, and it will look very dystopian – but a broader view of the entire work gives a more balanced perspective.

True Dystopias are relatively rare. Mad Max was set in one, but even there, there was hope, so it was not absolute. Most dystopias are relative (distinguished with a lower-case ‘d’); while things could look grim, there is the potential for circumstances and situations to improve.

A lot depends, I think, on the status of the PCs when it comes to applying this thinking to TTRPGs. If they are a lone band of rebels, the setting is a lot more Dystopian than the exact same setting if they are but one band of many seeking to put things right (or at least, to make them better).

That’s because, while some will fail, others will succeed and improve things just a bit, giving new hope and encouragement to future bands. It may take years or even generations, but so long as cumulative gains outweigh cumulative setbacks, the narrative is an optimistic one.

The Constraints Upon PCs

Perhaps a different perspective: The less constrained by rules, regulations, and laws the PCs are – the more willing officialdom is to bend to the whims or needs of a select few, whatever the justification may be,, the more the trend of the narrative is to Dystopia, no matter what the background. Should that background already be fairly dark, you have what could legitimately be considered a Dystopian game in a Dystopian setting, and the PCs – no matter what their intentions – are part of the problem. Things can only get worse, no matter how much they seem to improve superficially – the heart of the tree is rotten and will not weather the storm at some point.

This puts the social dynamic of a campaign, beyond any initial starting point, in the hands of the PCs, regardless of what genre of campaign you are running. The first Zenith-3 campaign started in an extremely dystopian 1960s – McCarthy was President, there was something akin to a police state, the police were corrupt, the courts were bought, and Organized Crime ran the streets. It took two game years to change all of that – not to perfection, but to something better, in which there was hope that the future would be even brighter – and another year to oust the alien infiltrator who had enabled it all (lest he corrupt things all over again). Yet the villain always did what he did with the best of intentions. Though the setting was Dystopian, the story was of climbing the mountain. The current campaign is in a superficially more Utopian setting – but there are cracks through which a number of Dystopian currents flow, and they are slowly gathering in strength.

Ultimately, there will be a confrontation – but before you can have one, you need to identify the responsible agency, and right now, there are just a bunch of people with good intentions who disagree with each other – and by putting their vested interests ahead of the long-term good of society, they are engaged in dragging the utopia down. A broad social movement like this is hard to arrest (and it’s not the only such movement), but this is a superhero campaign – the players know that sooner or later someone will (metaphorically) put their hand up to be target #1. The key point: Neither were designed to be pure dystopias nor utopias – they were designed to be places where interesting adventures could happen. What about my other campaigns?

The Zener Gate campaign was always about Dystopia becoming Utopia (while sowing the seeds of its own potential downfall). It won’t be long before the PCs are in a position to undo the dystopia – or, more correctly, confine it to a single Presidential term.

The Adventurer’s Club campaign is altogether more optimistic in setting, but with parts of the world succumbing to a Dystopian Horror in the rise of the Fascist powers, and various villains seeking this or that at the expense of the relative Utopia. The setting is not perfect, but it’s getting better in some places – in part, thanks to the PCs and their allies – but there are enemies both foreign and domestic with whom they have to grapple. Perpetually set in a mid-1930s in which the Great Depression was less severe than in our world, and so did not spell the doom of the 1920s-style entrepreneur-inventor, everyone can see a future World War on the horizon, and most view it with the optimism that was rife at the start of the historical war – “There and back, six weeks tops, be good to teach Mr Hitler a lesson!” While there are realists who know it will be longer and more difficult than that, they are generally ignored by everyone as doomsayers. So this is a Utopian campaign that is slowly descending into Dystopia – while holding that darkness at arm’s length. The PCs, of course, make regular excursions into it to beat it back and preserve the virtues they represent – ‘truth, justice, equality and opportunity for all’ if I were to put it into words, which they would not – for one more day / week / month / year.

Most of my Fantasy games have some sort of Lurking Darkness that attempts to corrupt a simple medieval near-utopia, taking advantage of the corruptible nature of humans. But a “simple medieval near-utopia” is not necessarily that pleasant an existence for many; what they have is hope that things will get better.

What about your campaigns? Where do they sit on the scale between Absolute Dystopia and Absolute Utopia, what is the trend from forces outside the PCs, and what is the observed trend of their actions – which way is your game society headed? And do you want to take advantage of that, or fight against the rising tide?

Perhaps, regardless of the backdrop, any reality in which the common folk and ordinary people have such hope is not actually Dystopian at all. Food for thought, isn’t it? And with that rather cheery thought to end on, I think I’ll call this a wrap!

A relatively short and focused article today, designed to give me the maximum running room to get the final part of the ongoing Long Road series out the door.

Adding Layers To Encounters

Imagine that the PCs are in the middle of a fight, battling a non-sentient creature. It’s been a knock-down drag-out affair that has knocked both sides around for several rounds now.

And then one of the PCs gets knocked down, pushing aside some underbrush, and revealing a fresh footprint in the earth – scaly, reptilian, and humanoid…

Right away, the current conflict assumes new dimensions. There is an implied potential connection between this indication of a future encounter and the one that is currently playing out, deriving from the potential connection between the two creatures concerned.

Is the creature now being combated the equivalent of an attack dog? Is it a pet? Is it a rival for domination or survival in this location? Might there be a sudden attack from the scaly humanoid from some other direction? Or is the creature buying time for Scaly to set traps or make a clean getaway?

What was a simple-but-difficult encounter, mindless entertainment of a sort, suddenly grows all sorts of social and tactical dimensions, potentially far more important and significant than it initially appeared.

Every party has its combat-monsters and its deep thinkers (rarely do the two coincide); an encounter playing to the former generally leaves the latter disengaged to at least some extent. Suddenly, they have a whole lot to consider and act upon, and the combat-monsters are bereft of their backup – hopefully just at the point where they start to feel like the group have bitten off more than they can chew.

This is a simple example of adding a second layer to an otherwise straightforward encounter.

Almost every encounter in an RPG can have added layers incorporated in this way. Parts of this practice should be no-brainers to any reasonable GM:

For some days now, the PCs have been having meetings with [someone, it doesn’t matter who] in order to gain their support for [something, it doesn’t matter what – it might be their innocence in a court hearing or a business deal or political]; at the next such meeting, just as all the side-issues have been dealt with and the negotiations are getting to the heart of the matter, the NPC party comments “You know, I was having dinner the other night with [PCs arch-enemy] the other day, and [s]he made a most interesting observation. He thinks there could be clear benefits to the Kingdom…”

It doesn’t matter how valid the point is that’s about to be made, the whole discussion has suddenly been overshadowed by the sudden connection between this NPC and the PCs arch-enemy. So potent is this association that even a decision in their favor is suddenly suspect, to be taken apart. Are the PCs playing into their enemy’s hands, or is he simply playing with their heads by proxy? Or is there a whole lot more to the story? Is their enemy really in favor of them doing what they had already decided they wanted to do? Or is he using reverse-psychology on them to get them to wave off on something that he really doesn’t want them to get involved in?

Sometimes – perhaps even most of the time – this will be just the DM playing with the players’ heads for the entertainment of all concerned. But there is the nagging risk that this time, there’s more to it.

Too Many Layers Grow Opaque

Once you get into the habit of “enriching” your encounters, it becomes easy to go too far.

To use the second example to demonstrate:

“On the other hand, [Another Arch-enemy] made a powerful presentation to the Chancellor of the Exchequer the other day, pointing out how risky the proposal is, in terms of the Kingdom’s [economics or trade or self-defense or whatever]. The Chancellor is a very powerful man within the court…”

The PCs now have one enemy who is supporting their proposal, presumably for his own purposes, and another who is opposing it, presumably because it runs counter to their own purposes. The PCs are caught in the crossfire, and the players will feel like they have lost all control over the situation and are being toyed with by one side or the other. It all becomes too much work to unravel at this point, and some of the hardiest of players will simply throw their hands in the air.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s entirely possible to stack three, four, five, even six different layers on top of each other. But you need to give the players time to integrate each into their world-view and planning before the centipede drops its next shoe.

Employ different vectors for each complication, at different times, and be sensitive to your player’s needs at the game table. You aren’t just there to complicate their lives; you are the impartial hand of fate pushing them on to greatness (well, to great adventures, at least). You can drop bombshells all around the players, but need to give them time to scramble from one side of the crater to the other before detonating the next.

It Shouldn’t Just Be Enemies

Having an ally unexpectedly oppose some action by the PCs – either out of genuine concerns or because he/she has been misled – is just as valid a curve ball to play, forcing players to make a choice: spend (waste?) time allaying the concerns of the NPC or risk losing an ally.

Added Dimensions Should Be Qualitatively Different

If an encounter’s core is combat-oriented, the most effective grenade to lob (sans pin) is going to be cultural or social or magical or theological or tactical or intellectual. That’s why the first example works, as was pointed out in the ensuing discussion.

It’s also why the proposed third layer in the ‘too many layers’ discussion doesn’t work – the proposed third layer is too like the second. Instead of adding to the situation, it takes away from it. Adding a third layer to the encounter that is of a different type – social or theological or arcane in nature, for example – begins hinting at potential motivations for the arch-enemy that the players may not have considered, or adding Oomph to them if the possibility is on their radar.

Clarity Is Valuable, Too

My final point on the subject is this: Once you get the players used to complex, layered, encounters, they will start looking for the curve balls, and jumping at shadows. Every now and then, you can cue up an encounter that is as straightforward as it looks to be on the surface, sit back, and watch the fireworks.

This maintains a sense of uncertainty that should be present. But it doesn’t work unless you’ve prepared the ground first – by layering your encounters.

WARNING: At around 35000 words, this is certainly one of the longest posts here at Campaign Mastery! Settle in for a long and sometimes-bumpy ride, folks…

This is part two of my review / demonstration of the “Tangled Web” campaign sub-structure. I’m going to presume that you’ve already read part one, which you can find at this link and dive (more-or-less) straight in right where I left off.

There are two points that I think I should make before doing so, afterthoughts regarding the content in part one.

First, I should remind everyone that there is a distinct shift in style and focus from this point in the adventure. The first part was all spy games as a vehicle to deliver and update the relevant background information; phase two of the adventure is a series of mini-adventures that together form a broader tapestry – a campaign within an adventure which itself is part of a campaign within a campaign.

I’m going to interrupt myself to make a point about infodumps. I’ll expand this comment into a feature article of its own at some point (I’ll just make a note to do that, maybe next week). These are universally hated as the most boring of adventures – situations in which the GM does nothing but pontificate and the players do nothing but listen – but they are a necessary evil, a way to give the players the information that their characters should logically have – which is essential to the players being able to make informed choices for their characters. There are three keys to success:

• Keep them as interesting and interactive as you possibly can.
• Follow them up with observations “in the field” so that the information doesn’t go in one ear and out the other. Make it relevant, ASAP. Preferably without telegraphing the course of the adventure!
• For the next few adventures, stay alert for the players having forgotten something that their characters would not have forgotten, and decide on a case-by-case basis whether or not to remind the player. A simple INT save by the character should be enough. Any character with an eidetic memory or equivalent should always justify a reminder – “you may have forgotten…”

With that, back to what I was saying…

These adventures quickly established a basic structural pattern, as you’ll see. A key thing to watch for are the progressions from one mini-adventure setting to the next – some of these will be highlighted within the text. Culture, environment, religion, politics, knowledge of science, social practices and expectations, and the way the locals use and live with magic – all evolve in a continuous progression as the PCs travel from region to region. Not that they or the players knew that at the time!

These encounters serve a meta-purpose within the broader campaign – they are all about how the game world has evolved from the starting point described in the original campaign background, provided to the players more than two years earlier (game time). I wanted to make the fact of the Ragnarok disaster feel real to them, and show how various communities had recovered and evolved in consequence. These changes don’t reflect what would be most likely to occur should some catastrophic event really befall the world or the region; things proceeded at the speed of plot. But “recovery from the disaster” and subsequent political developments is another of those important progressions from region to region.

The other point to be made is that with several of the synopses having been written after the fact just for this series, you might get the impression that there is little content overlap from one to another. In reality, while there is some effort to massively compress the preceding synopsis, I try to always hit the key points. Anything that’s not immediately relevant to the day’s play to come might get left out until it becomes relevant.

You always have to bear in mind that a synopsis has three jobs to do:

1. It has to remind the players (and, if necessary, the GM) of what happened in the last game session;
2. It has to remind the players of any context that they have to take into consideration during play;
3. It has to remind both players and GM of the bigger picture.

With the context in terms of this article now filled in, let’s get back to the synopses – after one more brief interruption…

Synopsis, Session 4 (from Session 5)

With the aid of Agent Indigo of UNTIL, the team had persuaded the 5th Reich to permit them to take advantage of their unofficial ‘corridors’ through to the US. Well, actually, they had mostly just been along for the ride, Indigo had done all the heavy lifting – several canapes and glasses of white wine, to be specific. It would be quite a while before they forgot the unique atmosphere of the capital, Fortaleza, where agencies played spy games on each other part of the time and socialized their days and nights away.

Despite philosophical objections, the team were also forced to admit that the Scientific Fascist Meritocracy that comprised the 5th Reich was actually good for the country, and showed promise of being an enlightened administration – an admission that none of them ever expected to be making, especially after their experiences with the far more “Traditionally Fascist” 4th Reich in Germany.

Muerte’s Chief Of Intelligence, Oskar Von Peirera, had handled the travel arrangements that were intended – in due course – to deliver them through Central America to the US, just in time to set up a semi-permanent base of operations and stop a group of radical domestic terrorists from detonating two stolen Russian Nuclear Weapons that had been sold on the black market.

The team had traveled to Maracaibo, Venezuela aboard a private jet (that had looked more like a large Cessna when it had taken off) in a carefully-orchestrated operation that would have made them extremely difficult to track.

When that aircraft landed, at about 1AM, Tuesday July 1, 1986, it taxied to where three jet-black jeeps flying the flag of the 5th Reich on each side waited. These were clearly “official vehicles”, with drivers who scrupulously ignored their passengers; there was enough room in each vehicle for two team members and driver.

There was little traffic on the streets, but what there was suggested that this was the universal road vehicle in these parts. Closer inspection as they passed under a street-lamp showed that each vehicle was actually a “Jimp” – obviously a cheap Jeep knock-off.

Maracaibo, post-Ragnarok, was a far cry from the tourist destination it had once been. If anything, it more closely resembled what they had expected Fortaleza to look like.

Eventually, the convoy delivered the group to a decrepit-looking trawler waiting at the docks. As they boarded, they noticed that many of the markings were in Cyrillic. They were taken below and shown to bunks, and informed that landfall in Jamaica for refueling would be in a little more than three-and-a-half hours. They would be required to remain below decks during that operation.

The fishing trawler chugged slowly out to see; none of the party were sure of the distances, but that estimate seemed awfully fast for a fishing trawler to achieve. This was Muerte’s signature once again – more was going on than met the eye. As soon as it was our of sight of anyone watching from Maracaibo, the trawler rose out of the water to reveal that it was actually some form of hover-vessel with an entirely separate drive system and a transparent conical canopy that unfolded over the trawler to create an aerodynamic shape. It was hard to estimate their speed, but the horizon was somewhere between 7 and 8 km away, and the wake behind the vessel stretched well beyond it. The waves were just a blur.

Since they had now been on the go for almost 18 hours, the team relaxed; better to grab a few hours sleep while they could. From what they had been told, their circumstances were going to rapidly grow more primitive, and likely to involve a great deal more physical labor.

About three-and-a-quarter hours later, they awoke when the vessel slowed, the canopy retracted and hid beneath the surface, and it was again reduced to a seemingly-standard Russian fishing trawler, rocking back and forth on the waves. From below came the sound of a cantankerous diesel engine stubbornly starting up after being wheedled by the ship’s engineer. The same ‘fisherman’ appeared and informed them that the vessel was approaching Montego Bay, and everyone should remain hidden until he came to tell them otherwise.

A few minutes later, the lights of the settlement became visible, and fifteen minutes after that, the vessel was tying up at the docks, disgorging a reasonable catch from various holds and nets, and taking on fuel, ready for another run. Runeweaver (now Specter, and publicly using the name Isaiah Lucas), was a little stunned; Jamaica reeked of Magic, it was everywhere. Even the pump depositing diesel fuel into the so-called trawler was powered by an Imp. Since arcane constructs had a tendency to explode on contact with Psychic Assemblies, he hastened to warn Vala, now Zeitgeist, and using the name Carmen DeLambert.

Two men in dark suits and sweating heavily in the pre-dawn heat attempted to conceal themselves in the shadows of the docks, without any great success. The captain walked down the Gangplank and approached them. A few words were exchanged, before the Captain removed something from his back pocket and held it flat in his right hand. A green spiral of energy erupted from whatever it was and rose about 15 cm. One of the men asked a question, to which the Captain replied, holding up fingers on his left hand to be sure that he is understood: two, three, one. The other man nodded, and said something, before the pair offered a Nazi salute and turned away.

You might have suspected the captain of selling you out if some of the party weren’t passable lip readers; the pair were relaying orders from Oskar Von Peirera to the Captain, advising him that passage for his ‘guests’ had been arranged with ‘the Rams’ through their territory from Puerto Barrios to America, somewhere East of the Sierra Madre. The ‘usual exchanges’ would be made en route – which they party interpreted to mean that ‘the usual bribes would be paid’. The 2-3-1 referred to Two women, Three men, and one “Ktzanmann”.

Dawn was almost an hour away, and the tide had just turned, when the struggling diesel was again coaxed into its chugging, sputtering, resemblance of life. The wind was a stiff breeze from the Northeast, the humidity 68%, and the temperature 36°C. By noon, according to the forecast, it will be 84% and 42+ degrees, and dark storm clouds would be lining the horizon with the prospect of 6-7 hours of tropical monsoon.

Once beyond the headlands, the vessel repeated it’s ‘party trick’ and transformed into its ‘speed racer’ configuration. The only person who considered this speed to be slow was St Barbara, who could hit Mach 5 if she needed to.

The sailor who was acting as liaison to the passengers came below and informed the team that breakfast would be served in the galley in an hour, and they should reach their destination in a little over 2 hours 40 minutes, which would be about 7AM Jamaican time, or 6AM local time, as they would be changing time zones again. They should prepare to disembark when the dawn broke. He also warned that the day would be hot and sticky, but much cooler in the highlands; storms would chase them all afternoon, so they would want to step lively. He then left without pleasantries, perfectly happy for the group to ignore him if they thought they knew better.

After another 50 minute cat-nap, the group had enjoyed about half a night’s sleep. Breakfast was shared with the crew, who had been ordered to ignore the team and eat in silence.

At 5:47 AM, local time, dawn broke. Twenty minutes later, the boat – again in ‘trawler’ mode – pulled up at a makeshift dock at what was left of Puerto Barrios, Guatemala. The port had not really recovered since Ragnarok washed most of the existing structures out to sea and the government collapsed. In fact, the entire culture had regressed to a tribal level.

Directed up a narrow valley, the team were met by a man who introduced himself as Maynor Estuado Morales, their guide. He had been sent by as a “Diplomatic Escort” by those who oversaw the Central Regions to guide them through the labyrinth of local politics and secure them passage through the myriad kingdoms that lay between here and their destination, a service that his organization had been contracted to provide by the Fifth Reich. The first of those Kingdoms belonged to King Hector, a vainglorious bully who was possessed of a certain craftiness.

In each Kingdom, they would be required to present themselves to the ruler and accept a task from him to earn them passage through their lands to the next Kingdom. These were usually minor, requiring an hour or less.

To travel through his realm, King Hector had agreed to loan the group enchanted slippers that would greatly accelerate their passage. They were self-adjusting in size and unisex in nature, but would take some getting used to – and there were storm clouds on the horizon to the east, so they should probably get started….

Key Points & Notes

This synopsis had to recapitulate the transition between phases of the adventure, and – perhaps more importantly – recapture the sense of such a transition taking place. The events in Jamaica were critical to that, and that’s why they received almost as much space as the preceding events – 430 words vs 680 words.

The next key item was recapitulating the introduction of Maynor Estuado Morales, who would be a key figure throughout the next several adventures, and who is likely to be a recurring NPC in the campaign. In the same paragraph I reminded the players of the impression they had been given of King Hector by Morales.

The last two paragraphs frame the pattern of the adventures to follow. I actually used a more complete breakdown to prepare the mini-adventures:

1. Border observations – first impressions of the Kingdom to come
2. Describe the Rapid Transportation Method provided for the PCs, usually some roleplay
3. Travel to the Monarch, Observe life in the Kingdom, sometimes with commentary by Maynor Morales
4. Meet The Monarch
5. Receive the Task
6. Travel to the Task location, more observations of life in the Kingdom
7. Complete the Task
8. Travel to wherever they need to go to have the Task completion recognized, still more observations of life in the Kingdom
9. Travel to the border, final observations of life in the Kingdom, summation

Aside from being a logical sequence (which I varied at need), each stage is designed to provide context for the next; there are some important and noteworthy underlying assumptions being made here. For example, no Monarch exists in isolation; an observer would form opinions of that Monarch based on what they saw of the Kingdom they ruled over.

Having met (and interacted with) the Monarch, the observers have the chance to make more observations of life and interpret how the Monarch’s personality, policies, and the restrictions under which they suffer, impact the Kingdom they rule.

There usually turns out to be “more” to at least one aspect of the Kingdom than first appeared. Sometimes that was the Monarch, more often it was the Task, and occasionally it was the environment through which they traveled, or some combination of these.

It should also be noted that the PCs were free to interrupt their journey to investigate something further, or interact with the locals, though the background strongly motivated them not to do so.

Finally, I kept careful track of travel time, and worked backwards to determine their initial arrival time, estimating how long the Tasks would take. I even adjusted the efficiency of the rapid transit provided somewhat to (a) keep them believable and reasonably limited, no matter how fantastic in nature they might be; and (b) to fine-tune the schedule of events.

If the Tasks had been the standard “an hour or so” promised (some were, some weren’t), and there were no diplomatic games and delays along the way, the journey had to take the promised length of time. It was the accumulation of these delays, and subsequent impacts on the journey, that were to push the PCs ever closer to (and beyond) the deadline imposed on them by the circumstances of the adventure.

This produced a gradual increase in the tension as this mini-campaign took place, a gradual increase in the emotional intensity that let it achieve a crescendo at the right time.

Synopsis, Session 5 (new)

For some reason, minimal notes exist of this game session, and no formal synopsis was produced. What’s below is minimalist and has been assembled after the fact specifically for this article. This origin means that everything you’ve already read about has been omitted from it, which would not be the case if this were produced for in-game use.

Society in Guatemala was primitive, at a Hunter-Gatherer level, and Magic was used to aid in the hunt, preserve food, and to keep King Hector in power, which he achieved by being the biggest thug. The buildings were primitive, made of mud-and-sticks with the occasional recycled pre-Ragnarok leftover added to the mix. The Jungle had reclaimed what little evidence there had been of civilization.

The magical slippers permitted a single step to cross a distance of 100 feet, in a straight line – but if the wearer were not careful when climbing a slope, they could easily end up entombed in the terrain they were supposed to be traversing, and similarly could find themselves some distance in the air if similar caution wasn’t taken when descending. They followed the feet of the wearer when they lifted their foot to take a step, both in direction and in angle.

It was also quite tricky turning corners in the slippers, and quite easy for the feet to materialize several feet apart. There was more than one minor fall as people ‘landed’ doing the splits! Nevertheless, it didn’t take the travelers too long to get used to them, and found that with sufficient attention, they could really devour the distance at something close to the 50-1 theoretical speed promised by the slippers. In short order, a fourth drawback became apparent – the slippers might abolish the distance between here and there to a single step, but the energy consumed by the wearer was unchanged – one quickly became ravenous and dehydrated, and more prone to make mistakes. Fortunately, Maynor had used them before, and was aware of these problems, forcing the team to eat, drink, and consume salt every few steps.

Morales revealed that the slippers had been the ‘price’ demanded of himself (on behalf of his organization) by King Hector on a past occasion, but that his thugs and bullies found using them too exhausting; they didn’t permit them to be ‘everywhere’ the way Hector envisaged. He broadly hinted that this was not an accident.

As the early morning wore on, the group climbed ever higher in altitude, and eventually reached the grass huts of Guatemala Antigua. A throne had been woven out of grass around the frame of an old campfire stool, and emplaced on the top of what had once been a yellow-and-green bus, making it the most elevated point in the village that was now the capital of Guatemala. The journey had taken a little more than three and a half hours instead of three and a half days.

King Hector greeted his ‘guests’ warmly from the throne and made a superficially respectful speech that repeatedly reminded Morales of the great favor that he was doing for the Cult Of Rams. He then ordered that they be fed, which quickly demonstrated that several within the village were magically gifted to some extent, but this magic was used for very simplistic purposes – enhancing personal strength, or hunting ability, or replenishing the fruit-bearing trees and bushes that grew naturally.

To amuse himself while the travelers ate and drank, Hector wrestled his warriors. It was quite obvious that he was using magic to ‘cheat’ in these bouts, and that without the backing of Morales “group,” his rule would not last very long.

Finally, Hector got around to specifying the price of passage – there was a treasure that he had promised to a loyal underling as a bride price for the underling’s daughter. Unfortunately, the escort that was delivering it had been attacked by bandits en route, and had hidden the treasure – a jeweled egg – in a cave near the religious site of San Martin Jilopeque, sacred to ‘the old religion’.

To earn passage, all the travelers had to do was retrieve the egg from its hiding place and deliver it to the chief administrator of the small town of Xuctzul. They could then proceed to the border at at El Ciebo, where they would return the loaned “magic feet”.

That seemed straightforward enough – possibly too much so. Hector’s expression showed that he thought he was being clever, manipulating Morales into putting his arcane talents into Hector’s service.

Nevertheless, agreement was not required; these were the terms that Hector demanded. Morales warned Hector against thinking himself too important to be disciplined, then gathered the team and left the grass throne of King Hector without a backwards glance – but not before noticing that several of the King’s warriors wore expressions of open disgust or contempt for King Hector. Clearly, they thought that such opportunities didn’t grow on trees.

In due course, the group arrived at San Martin Jilopeque, where the jeweled egg was reportedly hidden. The site proved to be an ancient temple of stone, wood, and grass; with a hole in the natural ‘floor’ leading to a vast cave, complete with its own underground volcano and hordes of bats. The group persuaded Morales to remain on lookout for the ‘bandits’ on the off-chance that they really existed, or in case King Hector sent some of his men to pretend to be bandits in order to support his rather weak story. Maynor had picked up on the sense of duplicity, too, and warned the group of the probability that there was more to the situation than met the eye, and asked if they were sure that they could handle whatever was below. The confidence with which the PCs responded told Maynor that there was a lot more to them than there appeared to be, too.

Once out of sight, they transformed into their new superhero identities. Each of them was convinced that at least half of Hector’s story had been fabricated and was being used to get the travelers (and especially Maynor) to do some dirty work on his behalf.

The cave was shaped like a thick sausage with an extra chamber at the far end. In that chamber was the statue of a Mayan deity that none of the group recognized, with the egg-shaped jewel mounted in his forehead.

Suddenly a beam of light shone out of the jewel and moved from person to person until it came upon Specter. The only mage within the party, he was the most susceptible to arcane manipulation.

The jewel contained the memories of the last Priest of the Mayan Deity, and those memories imprinted themselves on Specter, displacing his own, and then using his magical abilities to (temporarily reawaken the God while preparing Union Jack to be the human sacrifice needed to make the awakening and possession permanent; stone tentacles suddenly extruded from the cave walls, which had wrapped themselves around his wrists and ankles and pulled him flat, ready for the stone knife that had materialized in his hand to be used to complete the ceremony.

Key Points & Notes

Maynor doesn’t know who the PCs are, but his personality is to respect people until they give him reason not to; he treats them as social equals from word one. He also demonstrates that he has some knowledge of magic and the way it works, but has not shown the scope of his abilities as yet – he’s not a showoff. He is, however, prone to gossip. Urbane, civilized, well-spoken, able to manipulate people and situations, and prepared to let people and situations manipulate him when that’s necessary – he really is suited to a diplomatic role. This was not accidental; he had been selected for this role by virtue of his traits and abilities by people who knew what they were doing.

There are some GMs who are hesitant about putting an NPC into a party who is more competent in some areas than the PCs. There are even more GMs who would hesitate to give that NPC any level of authority over the PCs, first and foremost because he’s an NPC. This synopsis and the paragraph summarizing Maynor’s personality, above, show that it can be done, and be successful.

There are times when he takes the lead and decides on behalf of the group, as with King Hector; there are times when he backs off and lets the PCs make their own choices. The difference is whether or not his special expertise is relevant to the situation. If it is, he steps forward; if not, but he has relevant knowledge, he conveys that and waits for a group decision; if he has no better knowledge than anyone else (unusual), he asks an opinion of the person who seems best qualified to render a useful one and uses that as a springboard to a decision. His job (in this case) is to get the PCs to their destination, and he’s good at his job.

Synopsis, Session 6 (new)

This game session suffered from the same problem as the previous one (minimal notes), and no formal synopsis was produced. For a change, though, I know why that’s the case – I spent the time generating content for later in the campaign, and didn’t think one was especially necessary; what was needed could be improvised around the images presented to the players as ‘what their PCs saw’ in that game session.

What’s below has been assembled after the fact specifically for this article. In order to contrast with the preceding one, and permit comparison between the two, I have included the sort of context that I would provide if I were to actually use this in play.

To sneak into the US, where UN personnel aren’t permitted to operate, Zenith-3 have adopted new identities – St Barbara, Runeweaver, Knight, Vala, Defender and Mr Image have become, respectively, Nightshade, Specter, Basalt, Zeitgeist, Zantar, and Union Jack. UNTIL have also provided false (but backstopped) “civilian identities” to go with these new identities: Sue-Ellen Wilson, Isaiah Lucas, Frank Hudson, Carmen DeLambert, Brust, and Roger Woodchild, respectively.

In order to earn permission to travel through one of the local Kingdoms that have emerged in Central America and Mexico following Ragnarok (six years ago), the team and their “Diplomatic Escort”, Maynor Estuado Morales from Demon, have to perform a small task for each ruler. King Hector of what used to be Guatemala had thought he was being clever when he asked them to retrieve a jeweled “egg”. Although they would never be able to prove it, it seemed clear that he thought the only mage in the group was Morales, and that he would be possessed by the “Spirit” in the Gem and thus would become Hector’s servant, securing the backing of the most powerful and knowledgeable mage he had ever encountered.

Instead, the team had entered the caves beneath the Temple of the lost Mayan deity without Morales and assumed their superheroic identities, subjecting Specter to the mental domination of the “Spirit”, which replaced his memories with those of the Priest of the deity. A sacrifice was needed to permanently restore the reanimated God, who was animating his statue, with the gemstone the team required lodged in its forehead. As the first victim who came to hand, Union Jack had been chosen and immobilized by tentacles of stone from the walls of the cave.

Zeitgeist realized that Specter was under the domination of an implanted memory and excised it, at the last possible moment; at the same time, Basalt grabbed one of the stone tentacles and tore it in two, careful not to injure his teammate. The statue of the lost Mayan God reached down and grabbed Basalt in its grip; he planned to extrude two extra limbs to grab the wrist of the hand that had him trapped and attempt to break the limb, even though he was uncertain that what he was proposing was even possible.

Somehow – and not in this order – the following occurred:

• The spirit of the Priest was forced into the statue, displacing the animating spirit of the Deity;
• The statue was destroyed;
• Morales became aware that the team were superhuman;
• The team learned that Morales represented House Aries of Demon, whose supreme leader, Morbane Alpha, had rescued Knight from the curse of the Blackwing Armor, and who they warily considered to be potential allies (but who they could not trust completely);
• The gem was found in the remains of the statue.

(I’m sure they did something unspeakably brave and clever to achieve this, but the details and specifics have been lost).

Using the 100-foot slippers provided by King Hector, they delivered the gem as promised, much to the surprise of the Chief Administrator of the village – who inadvertently contradicted almost every element of the story offered by King Hector, something that Morales duly noted. He issued a document, as the only person in the village who could read and write at more than a 3rd-grade level, to document the fact and grant them permission on behalf of King Hector to complete their journey to the border at El Ciebo, gateway to the Kingdom of Tabasco.

Key Points & Notes

Because the spy-games part of the adventure isn’t particularly relevant to the day-to-day adventuring that was underway, most of the context is left unstated. The entirety is summed up in “To sneak into the US” – no mention of why being necessary at this point. The context then segues directly into a reminder of the new identities that have been adopted.

The second paragraph also does double or even triple duty – re-introducing Maynor and King Hector, providing context local to this particular adventure, and reminds the players of some speculation made at the table that seemed important.

The third paragraph completes the entirety of the synopsis of past days’ play.

All of this is minimal, because this particular mini-adventure was reaching its peak at the start of Session 6, and the action was about to start. A good synopsis doesn’t just capture the who and what, but also the mood of the table at the time. Being brief lends itself to exciting action sequences.

Unfortunately, the full specifics of that action have been lost; all I could offer were my notes of the outcomes. I have the vague memory that they took the gem up to Maynor before resuming the civilian identities that he knew, but I’m not even sure of that. Sometimes, later synopses fill in some of the blanks, but in this case I don’t think they do.

It’s a minor loss, but it does show the value of these synopses beyond the immediate benefit of refreshing the player’s memories.

Synopsis, Session 7 (from Session 8)

Zenith-3 have been recruited by UNTIL for an ongoing covert operation into the United States, with a very urgent initial assignment: Tracking down some nuclear devices that, it is thought, an Arms Dealer has sold, or is selling, to domestic US Terrorists.

Completing this assignment required the team to adopt new disguises and (in some cases), new ways of using their powers. Knight became Basalt, a man made of rock; Defender became Zantar, a Kzin hunter and tourist; Mr Image became Union Jack, an identity that he liked so much that he thinks he’ll keep it; Runeweaver adopted the identity of Specter, the ghost of a masked adventurer from the American Revolutionary War; St Barbara embraced the power of the Dark, and became the Ninja named Nightshade; while Vala chose to rely on her powers of illusion to appear almost human, adopting the name Zeitgeist.

To get to the US without detection, they have been injected into the network of kingdoms occupying what used to be Central America and Mexico, and are now run by the same Demon House that recently helped Knight escape being Blackwing, the psychological impacts of which he was still coming to terms with.

To escort the team, and guide them from Kingdom to Kingdom, House Aries sent Maynor Estuado Morales as a “Diplomatic Escort”.. He does not know who the team really are; their passage was arranged by Fuhrer Muerte’s Chief Of Intelligence, Oskar Von Peirera as a favor by the 5th Reich to the global community, i.e. UNTIL, but he does now know that they have paranormal capabilities.

In Guatemala, the society was primitive, at a Hunter-Gatherer level, and Magic was used to aid in the hunt, preserve food, and to keep King Hector in power, which he achieved by being the biggest thug. The buildings were also primitive, mud-and-sticks with the occasional recycled pre-Ragnarok leftover added to the mix.

In Tabasco, the team found simple Agriculture, which the locals enhance through the use of Magic to do things like aid crop fertility, protect the grain from parasites, insects, and unfriendly weather, and – of course – to keep King Rohaz in power; he preserves his authority with a mixture of High Justice and personal rewards for loyalty, the beginning of a Baronial system – all with a uniquely Mexican twist. The construction was eons more advanced than that of the Guatemalans, even if some of it may have been recycled from Mexico’s ancestors.

Each Kingdom has had its own methods of rapid travel, available only to the elite. In Guatemala, the group were loaned Persian Slippers that enabled each step to cover great distances. Using them took a little getting used to, because the elevation of the next step relative to where you already were was unchanged; choose a path that was too steep and you could trip over or bury yourself. It would even have been possible, in theory, to encase yourself in solid rock!

When the travelers reached the border town of El Ciebo, they saw that the Tabascans, in contrast, had riding animals that were at least semi-domesticated – again, with a twist: King Rohaz and his party were riding Dinosaurs about the same size and weight as horses, which magic had been used to at least partially domesticate.

In each Kingdom, to earn passage from the local dictator, the group are required to perform some “minor” favor. The local monarchs have been told only that your passage has been organized by the Demon hierarchy, and on that basis, the smarter ones have deduced that you are far more capable than ordinary people – a subtle insight that you would have put beyond them at first glance, which is a valuable reminder that “Primitive” doesn’t mean “Stupid”.

In Guatemala, they had to recover an enchanted Gem that King Hector had promised to a supporter. In Tabasco, King Rohaz tasked you with hunting down a “monster” that has been taking the locals from the El Ciebo region, and that has evaded or destroyed every hunting party that he has sent against it – his best twelve men so far. You got the impression that if he lost many more of his inner cabinet, his grip on power might become tenuous.

To assist the group, he added his best two remaining Hunters, Pedro-the-wary and Gonzales-The-Strong to the party as guides. They escorted the party to where the most recent disappearances had taken place, describing how a hunting party of two dozen people had simply vanished into the jungle without a trace. The clearing ahead was where their tracks simply ended.

Like the group, they have been sent to hunt “The Monster”. Pedro warned that many hundreds of different kinds of creature live in the jungles, and all of it has just one purpose: to become invisible until it suits the creature otherwise.

Nightshade had just used her machete to open a passage through the vines and underbrush into the clearing and noticed multiple pairs of beady yellow eyes staring back at her from places of concealment in the shadows on the far side!

Key Points & Notes

With the climax past, there was room within the pacing to be a little more fulsome in this synopsis. In fact, this functions to take everything down a notch and establish a baseline from which the next climax will grow.

The important part starts “In Guatemala” because the synopsis then goes on to compare and contrast that ‘Kingdom’ with the next, Tabasco.

Having used the basic formula once to establish it, I was comfortable modifying it for a second appearance – Hence, Rohaz was already at the border town selected for the PCs entry into his kingdom. The reason for his presence there became clear when he gave them the task to secure his permission to travel through his domain – he had lost so many key men to the “monster” in the region that his grip on power was shaky.

You will have noted that this direct comparison structure was employed repeatedly. This drummed into the players’ heads the fact that significant clues would be contained in the progression from one kingdom to another and they approached (comparative) civilization. This started paying dividends right away, but I was intending to take care not to let that be lost between game sessions into the future, nevertheless.

The PCs were suspecting that the monster would turn out to be a T-Rex or perhaps raptors. I didn’t want to disappoint them – so I added an encounter with both to what I already had planned, as you will soon see!

Synopsis, Session 8 (from Session 9)

What follows has been annotated (with interruptions) and extended (I’ll tell you when that happens, and why). In other words, this isn’t just the synopsis from Session 9, it also contains a lot of the game-play and scripted dialogue from that game session.

The team formerly known as Zenith-3, and now operating under the name The Alliance (a name none of them are very happy with), have been recruited by UNTIL for an ongoing covert operation into the United States, with a very urgent initial assignment: Tracking down some nuclear devices that, it is thought, an Arms Dealer has sold, or is selling, to Domestic US Terrorists.

Completing this assignment has required the team to adopt new disguises and (in some cases), new ways of using their powers.

• St Barbara embraced the power of the Dark, and became the Ninja named Nightshade;
• Knight became Basalt, a man made of rock

;

• Runeweaver adopted the identity of Specter, the ghost of a masked adventurer from the American Revolutionary War;
• Vala has chosen to rely on her powers of illusion to appear almost human, adopting the name Zeitgeist;
• Defender became Zantar, a Kzin hunter and tourist; and
• Mr Image became Union Jack.

To get into the US without detection, the disguised members of Zenith-3 have been introduced into the network of kingdoms occupying what used to be Mexico and Central America, which are now run behind-the-scenes by the same Demon House that had recently helped Knight escape being Blackwing. The psychological impacts of the resulting transformation have naturally started to manifest, and can be expected to persist for a while longer.

To escort the team, and guide them from Kingdom to Kingdom, House Aries has sent Maynor Estuado Morales to function as a “Diplomatic Escort”. He does not know who the team really are; their passage was arranged by Fuhrer Muerte’s Chief Of Intelligence, Oskar Von Peirera as a favor to the 5th Reich.

In each Kingdom, to earn passage from the local dictator, they have been required to perform some “minor” task. The local monarchs had been told only that their passage had been sanctioned by the DEMON hierarchy.

In Tabasco, King Rohaz deduced from the special treatment that you were receiving that you were more than the ordinary people that you appeared to be, and tasked you with hunting down a “monster” that had been taking the locals from the El Ciebo region, and that had evaded or destroyed every hunting party that he had sent against it – his best twelve men so far. You got the impression that if he lost many more of his inner cabinet, his grip on power might slip.

To assist them, he added his best two remaining Hunters, Pedro-the-wary and Gonzales-The-Strong to the party as guides.

The team had previously seen that King Rohaz and his advisors rode dinosaurs, so it wasn’t a total surprise when they encountered a pack of raptors. Both the hunters and the reptiles earned themselves a measure of respect from the group before their powers began to give them the upper hand; the first wave of attackers were routed, and the second wave were driven off, but the third wave that had been emplaced to ambush anything who attempted escape along the one avenue not closed off by the first two groups of raptors had at least drawn blood before being scattered by the arrival of an opportunist T-Rex!

Fortunately, the team had dispatched enough Raptors that the larger beast chose to chow down on those remains rather than engaging with unpredictable humans, giving you the chance to escape into the Jungle.

They were regrouping when they began vanishing, one after another. Nightshade was the last to be captured by the tentacles snaking down from the tree canopy.

Their captors were creatures unlike anything the team had ever seen before, seeming to combine aspects of dinosaur and octopus. With each member of the group gripped securely by tentacles, they carried you all away through the trees, brachiating from limb to limb like apes – but these were “apes” with a reach of thirty feet or more.

Nightshade was contemplating revealing her hero identity to the hunters in an attempt to break free when the creatures reached a grassy clearing between the trees and lowered the humans into its center, releasing them. The aliens then took up positions surrounding the group. One came forward and began to draw in the sand, quickly conveying that they were intelligent and then drawing a strange symbol in the sand – a crown with a Chinese dragon entwining through it.

While none of you knew the meaning, some of you guessed it fairly quickly. Your guide, however, seemed to recognize it immediately, and declared, “This matter is no longer your responsibility. I will deal with this.” Nightshade was reluctant to concede full authority to negotiate with what was effectively an alien invasion to the member of House Aries, and the quest from King Rohaz gave her some justification in refusing, but she decided to play things cool for the time being.

Meanwhile, some of the other creatures were healing the group, and providing food in the form of a freshly-killed deer.

Even an awareness of surface thought made Zeitgeist aware of a phenomenon she had never encountered before, as the alien’s awareness split into two equal minds, and each of those then split into two more, while a fifth mind seemed to emerge from the shared consciousness to direct and coordinate the others.

The alien rose onto one tentacle and used its tail to form a tripodal support with the one limb serving as a bar while the others formed two of the three points of a triangle, giving it? him? her? perfect stability.

Waving one tentacle back and forth through the air, and whistling a complex birdsong, it started casting a spell with two remaining tentacles, suspending the deer in mid-air, casting a second spell with a third tentacle (occasionally borrowing the second from the casting of the first spell) that cooked the animal, while simultaneously casting a third spell with its fourth and fifth tentacles to remove the entrails and skin, and then to carve the beast into large steaming chunks, passing one to each of the humans.

Specter realized that this creature was not just a spell-caster, it was capable of casting three or four or maybe even five spells simultaneously. The aliens might have numbers equal to the human group, but in reality that meant that they probably outnumbered the team, three or more to one! Their biggest limitation, so far as he could see, was only having two eyes!

When Zeitgeist waved away the offered food, the alien cast another complex set of spells to identify the problem and then transform the food into a form suitable for her digestion – exotic crystals. Basalt, noticing this, was immediately concerned that one of the hunters might realize that this showed she was not as human as she appeared, but fortunately they were too busy eating to notice.

Pedro-the-wary, true to his name, observed between mouthfuls that the deer had obviously been prepared in front of them so that they would know that it was safe to consume.

Maynor, meanwhile, had seated himself in Lotus position and begun to meditate while the alien negotiator continued to chirp at him and draw sketches in the sand. As the group finished eating a more substantial meal than any they had enjoyed since arriving in Dimension-Prime (or in years, in the case of the Hunters), the negotiator rose up and cast a spell opening a portal to somewhere else, and the other aliens began gesturing with their tentacles for the humans to precede them through it.

The group hesitated only momentarily – the aliens could easily force them if they wanted to. The only way to achieve an outcome that was in any way satisfactory was to play along until negotiations could commence.

There’s a lot that subsequent synopses leave out because it wasn’t immediately relevant after it had been played out. Long-term, though, it will be immensely significant, (and the players have had a small taste of that), and contains ideas that other GMs might be able to use, so I have decided to expand the “actual” synopsis above with excerpts and some summarizing before continuing.

The portal took the party to a plain alongside a cliff face containing a number of caves reachable by metal ladders. The rungs were spaced appropriately for humans to use, and many of the ladders would have been completely unnecessary for the aliens given the length of their reach – even if they didn’t employ some sort of levitation.

There were about 40 of the aliens present, along with the missing warriors belonging to King Rohaz, and a number of women (who Rohaz didn’t think worth mentioning). These are sitting in a natural amphitheater on stone benches while two of the aliens draw on blackboards. The scene is immediately recognizable as a classroom. The lesson itself, from what you could tell, was a complicated brew – part mathematics, part logic, and part philosophy.

When the ‘teachers’ notice your arrival, one raises a tentacle to suspend the class, and the hunters rise and walk toward your group, who are still arriving through the portal, their arms upraised to show they hold no weapons. You notice as they approach that several of them still have machetes, knives, or holstered firearms, by their sides.

There’s a lot of important subtext to the dialogue between NPCs that followed, so I will quote it in full. Note that it was written in the present tense for presentation in-game.

“Ola, and Welcome, Pedro-the-wary and Gonzales-the-strong. Who are these people that Rohaz has sacrificed alongside you?”

“Strangers and guests of the Greater Power, sent to earn passage through Tabasco,” replies Gonzales.

“If they are not of the tribe, the Rheezok must deal with them directly. But you, as honored hunters of the tribe, have a choice. You may commit whatever form of ritual suicide you prefer, or you may join us in study, renouncing the rule of Rohaz. We are learning many things; never again shall the people go hungry,” replies the spokesman. As he says the last, he waves one of his hands over the palm of the other, which obligingly sprouts a small flame.

“My loyalty is not so easily overturned, Jose-The-Eagle,” replies Pedro. “Why do these things teach you such magic?”

“For many reasons, Pedro. First, because it makes us more worthy to work alongside them; second, to prove that they will be more generous rulers than Rohaz-the-bully; and third, in recompense for our loyalty. Come, join us; if you are not convinced at some future time, you can always choose to employ your weapons.”

Pedro and Gonzales look at each other, and after a moment, Gonzales nods. He and Pedro wave farewell to you and go over to join the class, which quickly resumes.

Zantar then says to the rest of you, “That was very interesting. I would surmise that King Rohaz has just lost another pair of his ‘best men’. It is only a matter of time before his leadership is challenged – and even rudimentary magical training should be ample to ensure that the challenge is successful, unless we or someone else stand up for him. Any takers?”

There were none; who would want to fight to preserve the rule of someone known to his own people as “Rohaz The Bully”?

Maynor approaches Nightshade. “We should speak. The others defer to you, whether you lead them or not. I don’t know who you really are, and it is not my concern. I can speak for those who rule this part of the world, but cannot do so for the world outside. I know that you are more than you seem, for the same reason that the rulers you have met know – no ordinary person would be granted such assistance by the Fuhrer Muerte. What I need to know is whether or not you can speak for those beyond these shores?”

This put her on the spot; she thought carefully and then said that she could not tell them what to do, but those who they would talk to would consider carefully anything she might tell them, and any recommendations she would make, and in turn, they could be quite persuasive..

“Then you and your group should at least be witnesses to the negotiations. Come.”

As they walked, Maynor told the group what he knew of the aliens. “There are many worlds, as alike as two books on a library shelf. One may be a different edition of the same book, while another concerns a completely different subject. The closer to the shelf of the book you are comparing with, the more closely related the two are likely to be.”

This was all old news to the players, who were seasoned time- and dimension-travelers. But Maynor didn’t know that.

“There was a mighty Emperor of this world who was overthrown and his memory taken from him. Immortal, it was but a matter of time before his genius reasserted itself. He sought then to reclaim his throne, but history had passed him by, and he was opposed by the mightiest of the infidels – aliens, gods, sorcerers and mortals. Evenly-matched, their conflict threatened the stability and very existence of that which they vied to rule; until a bargain was struck between the enemies.”

This was a somewhat skewed version of the conflict between The Mandarin and The Champions, which had occupied the first two real-time years of the campaign back in the early 80s.

“In their travels, the infidels had found a world in desperate need of strong rule, having been subjugated by suicidally-insane extremists and carried to the edge of destruction by fanatics and ideologues. They offered to leave him in peace if he were to turn his attentions to he conquest of that world, where none could oppose him.”

Reasonably accurate after 1,000 years of historical distortion and as it might be abbreviated in a high-school history class. This was a world in which the Nazis won WW2, but Stalinist Russia survived. The two were about to engage in thermonuclear war in local-time 1962 when the players intervened to prevent at the time – but decided that regime change was beyond their do-gooder remit. A few months later, a quick return visit made it clear that they had simply delayed the inevitable and needed to take stronger action if they wanted to protect the planet’s population from the political extremes of their leaders, but they really didn’t want to do it. One thought led to another.

“His conquest of the human planet was trivially-easy. He then worked a mighty enchantment to accelerate time within his domain, enabling his new subjects to become a mighty Empire, conquering first the other worlds of his new Solar System, and then the great cultures of his new Galaxy. The inhabitants, some very human and some radically different, became new citizens of the Empire, for he was a benevolent and wise ruler.

All this came to light, and is relayed fairly accurately, in the buildup to Ragnarok. The official deal was that the Champions would leave the population and their Emperor alone, but one PC almost immediately started to renege on the agreement – not knowing that said Emperor had made arrangements to trick that PC into doing so. Ultimately, the Mandarin became an ally if not a friend.

The acceleration of time was a mechanism whereby events in that universe could evolve and change as quickly as I needed to in order to create interesting adventures.

That’s the end of what the players already knew – from here on, it’s all new information to them.

“Only one culture did he encounter whose citizens were his equal; but, having learned from the conflicts of his past, rather than engage in a futile and potentially devastating conflict, he chose negotiation and a live-and-let-live arrangement. The Rheezok came from a cluster of stars that had crossed through the plane of the galaxy eons earlier, a cluster that orbited the galaxy, bound to it but not part of it. From Earth, it’s analogue cannot even be seen without a telescope, for all that it is the second closest such structure to the planet upon which we stand.

“Relations between the two Empires remained cordial for centuries. Unexpectedly, and without explanation, the Emperor saw fit to reverse his temporal manipulation shortly thereafter; the galaxy was his, and there was little of value in easy reach beyond it, or so it is said. I myself was born into the 12,752nd year of his enlightened rule, on a world so distant that the light of Earth would take 142 years and some months to reach it, in a completely separate arm of the galaxy. Find Polaris, and turn 75 degrees. and near the Foot of Perseus, a great telescope may spy it from here.

“There came a time when our this universe and that of my birth faced mutual annihilation, and the mightiest forces of both collaborated to save all. But this could only be done for one of the two galaxies, which would be a blending of the two that had come before it. The Emperor sent forth his most skilled mages to prepare for the influx of refugees to come, but this left him without those he needed to actually open portals to the new worlds. For it was not merely a matter of travel to the Earth, but to almost every habitable star in this Galaxy.

“To remedy this lack, he renegotiated with the Rheezok; they would cast the portals on his behalf while he engaged in the enemies of existence responsible. So it was that he met his end, and then ascended to become as unto a God.” (a very meta- synopsis of Ragnarok and part of the outcome).

“In recompense, the Rheezok were gifted an entire arm of this galaxy; the Empire would stake no claim upon it, and citizens of that arm within the Empire would be relocated elsewhere. At least, that was the agreement; all I know of what transpired is that those scheduled to do so, those who had survived the conflict with the Enemies of the Empire, arrived here to join me.

“Over the years since, that group of refugees and myself have worked to integrate ourselves into this world, its communities and its government, under the command of one of the former planetary governors of the Empire. Others have taken other paths.

“Why the Rheezok are here, I do not know. I suspect that the answer will be pivotal. But I am bound by my oaths to the Empire and my oaths of loyalty to my Lord. They include the treaties between the Empire and Rheezok.

“Do you see my problem? Any agreement that I reach will be valid in practice only, unrecognized by the wider world, but that may not be sufficient to satisfy my obligations under those treaties, or the demands of the Rheezok.

“At the very least, I require witnesses to report these matters to the outside authorities, triggering negotiations that could destabilize certain delicate political situations at the very least.”

This was putting a large part of the future of the entire campaign into the hands of the PCs. Tell the world about the Rheezok and the US Government would hear about it; amongst others; any hint that one of their major political parties (if not both) had been ‘colonized’ by refugees from another dimension, and the US would collapse into anarchy, possibly triggering a fourth World War. And, unless the Rheezok were improbably modest in their demands, any misstep might trigger an even more widespread conflict. Peace and Galactic War might hang on their ability to satisfy the aliens.

The PCs discussed the situation intently for about an hour, noting that the treatment of the humans “captured” by the Rheezok was an important guide. Zeitgeist was able to confirm that none of them were under any duress, and believed implicitly in the trustworthiness of the aliens.

One Rheezok then led the group into one of the caves and used simple stick figures drawn in a sandbox to communicate its intentions, warning the group of what to expect. Specter attempted to analyze the magics being cast simultaniously:

1. Create force-field bubbles around each individual (including itself);
2. Fill the force-fields with an air-permeable gel that would not permit any lie to be heard (you could tell fibs until hoarse if you wanted to);
3. Create a hollow space within the gel around the heads of each individual by manipulating the shape of the gel;
4. Link the neural receptors of the ears within the hollow space with the speech centers of the alien, and vice-versa, using the gel as a medium and the bubbles to isolate each person from hearing what anyone else heard in their native tongue.

Of these four, only the first and third were straightforward, and they were complicated by needing to do it several times at once; an accomplished mage, he had near-zero confidence that he could even come close to attempting either of the other spells. Mentally, he revised the potential threat posed by the Rheezok to new heights.

“Now we can speak,” announced the alien, and each heard the words perfectly in their customary first language. Zeitgeist not only got the translations heard by the other PCs (through the mental link she maintained with the team), but also got a direct mental impression – effectively, the thought was being heard at six or seven times its normal volume, as though someone had put an electric bullhorn to her ear and was shouting through it. She immediately shut down the psychic link.

“Words not spoken cannot be heard. Words of deception will not be heard. Only the truth will be heard. I am the Eldar, I speak for the Rheezok. Man of the Empire, have you told these others of us?”

“I have, your excellency,” replies Maynor. “At least as much as I knew.”

As the Eldar continues to speak, it casts images onto the surfaces of each bubble with another spell, while continuing to maintain those it had already cast. “Our home was once located here.” The image of a group of stars, bound to each other, with the assembly bound to the greater galactic whole, was displayed.

“Our worlds were unlike yours in some ways and like yours in others. But, like you, we mastered our environment.” (Images of the Rheezok home-world, which almost looks underwater).

“In time, one arose who assimilated the galaxy to his rule. At first, this assimilation may have been a defensive maneuver; by the time it reached beyond the planets of the human sun, it numbered 3 sentient species and that was beginning to change, as each brought their own contributions to the resulting Empire. By the time the galaxy was filled, 325,000 species were part of the whole – many of them minor variations upon the same coding of life. Humans and those species sufficiently akin to humans to interbreed with them (given appropriate medical assistance) dominated; it was only appropriate that the Emperor was himself of that species.

“In time, we found his Empire, or they found us – a matter of perspective. Both pondered the problem of exerting dominance over the other, and came to the same conclusion. Then did the Emperor, accompanied only by his Imperial Guard, come amongst us to negotiate. Astonished by this audacity, we granted him leave to speak. Translating his words into our language – rendered utterly unlike your own by our anatomy – he said unto us, ‘If we contest for power, one must lose all, but the other will win but a fraction of what they already possess. Both would lose, and the citizens of both would suffer. I deem this to be unacceptable, and so come to offer terms.

“His words contained truth, and we acknowledged that truth and agreed to peace. He taught us some arcane practice that we did not know, and we taught him some arcane theory that he did not know, and respectful coexistence was cemented as policy between Empire and Rheezok.

“One condition only was placed upon this peace: that time proceed at the same pace in both, so that one could not launch a deception against the other. This was agreed to.

“Over the centuries that followed, mutual respect was acknowledged at every meeting between Empire and Rheezok. It became common for Rheezok adepts to tutor the most promising Empire adepts for a few human months, and for those Rheezok about to ascend to Eldar to visit the Empire Capital on Imperial Earth, and learn of the many thousands of lifeforms treated as equals there.

“Then, he came to us once again and did inform us out of mutual respect that the entire universe was shortly to be consumed in an unimaginable inferno. This explained many puzzling signs and portents that the Rheezok had perceived, and we knew that he spoke only truth.

“The Emperor told us that he and certain allies intended to subvert the plans of the enemies who had done this for their own ends. The prospects for success were slim, but could be magnified if more of the Empire’s powerful could be released to engage in the struggle. This required that their task, of protecting the Empire’s Citizens by migrating them to new homes in another realm of space and time, become the responsibility of someone else.

“The Emperor then offered to include the Rheezok in the resettlement program if they would perform that resettlement task when the time required. The Rheezok were granted one arm of the consolidated existence, for there was no certainty that the environment of our gathering of stars would be akin to what the Rheezok require, and we would not displace an existing sentient species from their homes.

“In time, planning was filled, and the Rheezok began to search for a new home. Many of the Rheezok did not survive the End Of All, but enough remained – some nines of tens of us – to form a culture of merit. The Rheezok knew that many of the Empire had also survived, and in time, Treaty would be renewed between Empire and Rheezok.

“For several solar cycles, we worked, and in time, a home was found that was both right and empty, and it became Rheezok anew. It was good. Then we began to see new signs and portents, akin to those that had puzzled the Rheezok in times past, and which we knew meant the destruction of all. Distant, is, but too close, too. Twos of tens had we spent preparing for the End Of All with the Empire; too close for such, comes danger anew.”

The PCs have done their best to forget this portent of Ragnarok II, in hopes (however slim) that the Rheezok were wrong, and because there seemed to be nothing that they can do about it. ‘One problem at a time’ is their motto whenever possible. They have received similar prophecies on other occasions that warned of Enemies becoming Friends and Friends becoming Enemies in the imminence of cosmic devastation, and some of that had also come to pass in-game. In fact, one could point to Maynor himself as an example – he represented Demon, a previous incarnations of whom were an enemy of the PCs, and some houses of which still were so. But Maynor was verging on being not just an ally, but a respected friend.

“Without Empire to discern the shape of menace, the Rheezok learned from humans to discover new truth within mystery, and worked to discover the truth of the new destruction of all. But one of those truths followed Rheezok back to Rheezok, and Rheezok-home was destroyed by one of the workers toward the end of all. Named, the one was, Ice Queen.

This was an old enemy of Specter, a mage of extreme power and cruelty. This was a great surprise to the player, who had not expected that I would have PC arch-enemies up to things that didn’t directly involve the PC in question. Me, I look at everything present and ask “what’s the best tool for the job that’s at my disposal?”

“Time track from the past of Ice Queen did the survivors follow, and here did it bring us.”

The Rheezok had explored the past of the Ice Queen until they came to her encounter with Specter (then Runeweaver), and followed his time-track back to Earth, and then returned to the contemporary time-frame. In other words, they ‘followed him home’. This meant that he had an unexpected share of the responsibility for them being there – he had never tried to mask his comings and goings, and now it was too late to do so. The player immediately took a more personal interest in the matter at hand.

“Fates bound together once more, and new home Rheezok do now require. Soon Rohaz-King fail, and Rheezok claim. Grow Rheezok home from this seed. Rheezok stay. More alliance, we bargain.

“Rheezok not take; Rheezok share. Humans suffer loss of heart, mind, knowledge after end-of-all. We work to restore for betterment of human and Rheezok. Once-Of-Empire say not yes or no; Allies Of Empire say not yes or no. Rheezok stay. Only more alliance do we bargain.

“I withdraw. You discuss alone. I return in human hand-span of human sun through sky.”

The Rheezok staying on Earth was not negotiable; they had set out to usurp the throne of Rohaz-the-bully by subverting the best that he had to offer, and had every intention of completing the process. What they were offering were terms of a broader alliance against the impending disaster.

This ultimatum – which is what it amounted to – was intended to be the cliffhanger ending to the game session. But the players continued to consider their alternatives even while they were packing up – that doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I know that I’ve got them fully immersed in a compelling situation.

They decided to permit the Rheezok to occupy Tabasco as a Refuge (they could hardly stop them), but to look for a more suitable home for them as they traveled, bearing in mind the ethical restraints that had been stated. While they could not speak with authority on the subject of the broader alliance, they welcomed any and all assistance in mutual self-interest, and would ensure that those with greater authority gave the proposal their full attention, in the expectation that any recommendation to form such an alliance would be accepted.

The Rheezok were willing to give the humans a reasonable deadline to look for a new home for them, but would continue their activities in the meantime as though their presence was to be permanent, because there was no certainty of an alternative being found.

The Rheezok, having understood the implications of Rohaz sending the group after them, would not provide a transit to anywhere except back to the region where they had been found – and to the time they were found. Anything more would have to wait on the formal negotiations between Earth and the aliens.

Key Points & Notes

This synopsis starts with some deliberate mixed messaging – the team are about to engage with wild dinosaurs, an action situation, but the format of the synopsis is longer and more low-key than even the previous one, spending a lot more time on context.

That psychologically prepared the players for the encounter with the Raptors and then the T-Rex to be just an entree for the main plotline within this mini-adventure, which was not to be combat-oriented at all. I don’t know that any of the players consciously picked up on this signal – I suspect not – but I have learned through experience that using ‘player reminders’ or ‘player briefing’ or whatever you want to call it adds considerably to the success, at an entertainment level, of a day’s play.

The Rheezok were a lot more significant than the local adventure; these were a major piece of the long-term campaign, and (in a way) it could be considered that everything up to this point had simply been to get the players into position to make decisions about them – decisions that everyone could see would have long-term implications and repercussions.

But there was a level of meta-planning involved, too – the encounter with the Rheezok, forced both Maynor and the PCs to lower their defenses somewhat more than they had done to date, establishing new levels of trust between them. Note that both parties had alternatives open to them, and it was up to the players which way things panned out; they chose something close to the best possible option available to them. The Rheezok’s “Truth Field” upped the ante again, and forced a deepening of that mutual trust.

I put a lot of design effort into the Rheezok, as befits such a major element. I wasn’t able to find an image on the net anything close to what I was imagining (I looked) so had to draw up something myself. The results weren’t perfect but they were good enough. I would have loved to find the time to do some action shots – Rheezok brachiating tree-limb to tree-limb, for example – but that wasn’t on the cards.

Synopsis, Session 9 (from Session 10)

I made reference earlier to how inadequate this synopsis was in terms of the Rheezok encounter. Now, readers can judge that for themselves.

Although it’s not strictly part of the synopsis, the confrontation with King Rohaz that followed was so much fun, and is so poorly represented in subsequent synopses, that I’ve decided to quote from it as well. All I’ve done to it is shift it into the past tense.

As an added bonus, I’ve included details of the riding dinosaurs and their natures, ready for GMs to import into some other campaign.

Zenith-3 aren’t feeling quite themselves, these days. They have adopted new identities for an ongoing periodic undercover mission from UNTIL and are in the process of being inserted into the USNA in order to undertake their first assignment: the recovery of some Nuclear weapons that are believed to have been purchased by a group of domestic terrorists with the intent to use them to make a political statement on the 4th of July.

Although they have yet to select a group name with which they are all happy, the new-look group of Basalt, Union Jack, Zantar, Specter, Nightshade, and Zeitgeist have at least begun to gel as a unit.

UNTIL did a deal with the 5th Reich to arrange the team’s journey through what used to be Mexico, which is now a group of semi-autonomous guerrilla states, all of whom answer to some degree to a hidden government built around House Aries of Demon.

The 5th Reich, in turn, had done a deal which requires the team to earn their passage through the different territories, guided by one Maynor Estuado Morales, representative of House Ares. The rulers are (for the most part) no dummies and have deduced that the party are more than just human, and have thus far scaled their “requests” accordingly.

Despite the delays that these ‘services’ represent, the team has, since coming ashore, covered almost 900 kilometers, climbing to over 1800m altitude, and descending again, no less than five times in the process – in about a day and a half. Since you have been told by your guide that your means of travel will get faster as you progress, and that the whole trip should take 2-3 days, they think they are a little behind schedule – but only a little.

You have just concluded a deal for Maynor and House Ares to protect Z3’s identities as “UNTIL agents with paranormal abilities” and assist in their mission as far as possible, without compromising the political neutrality that UNTIL have to maintain.

They have also agreed to a treaty with the alien Rheezok for mutual defense of the Earth against the Ice Queen or any other comparable threat; the PCs intend that the Rheezok’s presence be officially sanctioned on humanitarian grounds as they are refugees, but will have to work with the more progressive elements of the UN to have the emergent “nation” recognized officially – though none of the other “Kingdoms” of what used to be Mexico and Central America are recognized, either, so there will be considerable difficulties to overcome.

Now they have to deal with King Rohaz of Tabasco, who probably won’t like their report of how they found and “dealt with” the “Monster” that had been “taking his people”.

Maynor intends to simply incinerate the puffed-up ‘Monarch’ if he doesn’t go quietly, but that’s not a satisfactory answer to Nightshade. Maynor has been persuaded to give the team ten minutes to discuss alternatives while at the temporary cave settlement of the Rheezok – his ‘solution’ is always there as a fallback.

In a very fmailiar story, the next synopsis to be offered does an inadequate job of informing anyone who wasn’t there at the time of what happened. So here’s a summary of what actually happened in play:

Extracts from the Adventure Notes, Session 10

When the PCs return to El Ciebo, King Rohaz attempted to psychologically dominate the situation by keeping the PCs waiting. Maynor refused to play along, though he was clearly steamed by the treatment, he simply ordered the servants to bring them the finest of refreshments, and the most comfortable seating, at the King’s expense, that they may await the King’s pleasure. Of course, the most comfortable seating is the King’s currently-unoccupied throne, as Maynor told the PCs with a straight face.

Finally, Rohaz appeared and demanded an update from Maynor. What was the killer creature, and what had Maynor’s guests done to eliminate the threat? But first, remember your place, and return his throne – at once!

Maynor stood and answered, “Well that gets right to the heart of the matter, doesn’t it? The creatures – there were many of them – are known as the Rheezok, and what we have done to eliminate the threat is to give them your Kingdom, throne and all – though they dislike such seating, and will probably give it back to you if you ask them nicely. In a nutshell, you have made such a mess of things here that I have removed you from power.”

Rohaz sputtered and spouted, apoplectic and unable to form coherent sentences for a while. Finally, “You can’t do that, we had a deal” squeaked out from his inflamed cheeks.

“Oh yes, I can,” replied Maynor. “The terms under which you were granted power – and under which we agreed to support you in retaining that power – are quite clear. Pre-existing obligations override more recent bequests. The Rheezok have invoked a pre-existing obligation between themselves and my Emperor.”

“But – but – but – I won’t let you!” gasped Rohaz, who then made potentially the biggest mistake of his life, grabbing a spear from his honor guard and pointing it at Maynor.

Sensitive to the PCs squeamishness, Maynor didn’t incinerate the King on the spot, only the spear that he was holding, with a casual gesture.

“Understand this, Rohaz – there is a metaphysical storm brewing. The devastation that blighted your former nation was only the beginning. A larger, more deadly, war is still to play out on this world, amongst others.

“In that war, the Rheezok may be humanity’s greatest ally or their greatest enemy. We have bought their friendship by granting them dominion over this land until they no longer have need of it, one way or another. In return, they will protect and nurture the citizens to the mutual benefit of all – a process that has already begun. You can either be a part of that new beginning or swept away by a popular revolution – your best hunters and warriors now stand against you, and we will not protect you. The choice is entirely yours.

“I submit that we have thus completed the task you set us, and require that you furnish the promised transportation – Seven trained Riding Enjambre (the riding dinosaurs), well-rested, saddled and ready to go.

In short order, the saddled dinosaurs were brought before the party. By now, the sun was casting long shadows over El Ciebo. Maynor said, “The beasts are easy to ride once you get used to them. Have any of you any experience at Horse Riding?”

Some did, some did not.

“Well, the Enjambre are like riding stallions. From time to time, they’ll test you to see if you’re still in control of them; the rest of the time, they will be placid unless you’ve failed the last test, when they will be spirited and fractious.

“If all things were equal, we would stay here overnight and depart in the morning; but the temptation to do something stupid might yet prove too strong for ex-King Rohaz if we linger. There is still almost an hour of daylight left, and the Enjambre have excellent night vision; once I plant the suggestion of their next destination in their minds, they will proceed there by the fastest route they can find, whether we can see what they are doing or not. So I suggest we ride through the night and get a few hours rest at the capital of Tabasco, where I must give some instructions to the government regarding the transfer of power.”

The group quickly agreed to this plan. They were beginning to have serious respect and trust for Maynor, who was not at all anything like what they might have imagined a member of Demon to be.

“Once we are on flatter ground, I will give the Eljambre a treat that will increase their speed. They will need to rest by the time we reach Quetzacealcos, too.”

Taking the lead, he begins to cast a spell, while whispering in a strange voice to his mount, “I name you Feathercap. Gracias de Dias, Feathercap, Gracias de Dias. Begin.”

With a surprisingly level gait, despite their bipedal nature, the gently-named “Feathercap” sets off, followed by the others. Soon they begin picking their way straight down the rough and broken sides of a steep mountain, scrambling from perch to isolated patch of slightly-less acute ground, more or less in a straight line. It’s absolutely terrifying to look to one side and see a wall of rock, then look to the other and see only a dark void stretching away below you.

Eventually, the Eljambre decide that they need to change direction back to the East, though Feathercap is perched on flatter ground that looks no larger than a playing card. Because of the gathering darkness, you are only barely able to make out what takes place unless you have some form of augmented night vision.

Those who do see the tail of the Eljambre in front of them abruptly swing to one side as the creature turns on one foot almost in the opposite direction, dipping it’s shoulders thirty degrees into the turn.

Just as you feel gravity begin to tear you out of your saddle, the shoulders dip in the other direction, catching your fall, and before you know it, you are again progressing in a surprisingly level manner. From up ahead, you can hear Maynor gently snoring.

It’s pitch black by the time you pass through the small town of Gracias de Dias. You can see candlelight through the windows, mostly made from car windscreens, and covered on the inside by curtains made of tarpaulin. Feathercap stops, dips it’s head and long neck as though smelling the ground, and paws at the ground. Maynor stirs himself, and tells you all, “let them wander about for a few minutes to get their breath and restore their sense of balance. Be alert for any attempts to throw you.”

Five minutes later, he gathers the mounts close to him, and again casts his spell. “El Coba, Feathercap. Good beast. El Coba, now, Feathercap. Begin.”

Feathercap trundles gently off into the dark, followed a moment later by the rest of your mounts. As the ground begins to flatten out, having descended 1200m in about 15km, the Eljambre break into a gallop, almost a lope, which would surely trigger any tendencies toward susceptibility to seasickness.

After half an hour at speeds that are unguessable in the dark for those without night-enhanced vision, but feels too damn fast, and is quite definitely too fast for anyone with such vision but no riding skill, the ground starts to slope up again as you pass through El Coba. After again giving them a chance to restore themselves, Maynor gives them the name of the next town, and you are once again on your way. Ten kilometers later, and having climbed another thousand meters, you break through the thick plant life and crest another mountain range, at the peak of which lies the town of Tenosique. It’s now about 10PM.

As midnight approaches, you’ve paused to rest the Eljambre twice more, and have reached Batancan, where Maynor told you the road becomes straighter and more gentle. When you continue, it’s at an even faster gallop than before. An hour later, you are again resting your mounts, this time in Chable. 45 minutes or so later, and you reach Entre Hermanos.

A few km out of town, as a thin crescent moon rises – it’s less than a week until the new moon – the road begins to run alongside a small lake, and has become completely flat to the naked eye. You are traveling at a breakneck speed of 60 km/h, give or take, and there is just enough light for you to be aware of your speed.

By 4AM, you have rocketed through the marshlands of the Reserva de la Biosfera Pantanos de Centia and reached the coastal town of Frontera, on the southern side of the Gulf Of Mexico.

Although it is still dark, lamps and lanterns reveal dilapidated fishing vessels being made ready. The crescent moon is now high in the sky, and as bright as it’s going to get. Twenty minutes on, having left the fishing fleet in the distance, the first glow of approaching dawn is just barely becoming visible.

Forty minutes later, the predawn light is far more pronounced, as you race through the larger town of Paraiso and once again turn inland. You are resting the mounts once again in the town of Comalcalco as the Dawn breaks.

The remainder of your trip is in some ways even scarier than the part already completed. Your pace does not abate, except when you rest the dinosaurs and get your bearings for the next breakneck sprint, but now you can’t avoid seeing how fast you are going. What’s more, you are increasingly sharing the roads with other traffic, and no-one seems to have ever heard of road rules. Time after time, a collision is narrowly avoided as mounts – yours or theirs – leap one way or the other.

Still worse, you often come upon traffic headed in the same direction you are, but at a far more leisurely gait. Every time this happens, the dinosaurs begin to chase the traffic ahead, a malevolent look in their blood-red eyes. At one point, you come up on a flock of sheep being led to market; before you know what’s happening, each of your mounts has a woolen mouthful.

Nevertheless, you begin to get a sense of how the locals are utilizing the magic that House Aries permitted Ramoz to dole out, as you pass impossibly large and fertile crops that would have been remarkable in a region with access to heavy agricultural machinery. Local farms are small but prosperous.

As the traffic intensifies, the trip becomes more and more harrowing. Suddenly ahead looms a great wall surrounding a riot of color and noise. “The capital of Tabasco, Coatza-cealcos,” announces Maynor. “I will take the mounts to the palace. Here is a gold mark and a silver peso, each. Use the peso in the market to buy yourself some food and something to drink. Use the mark at the Villa Coatza-cealcos de Grande – any of the locals can direct you – and get a few hours rest. I will join you in an hour or two, and by 2PM I want us to be back on the road.”

Key Points & Notes

I’ve preempted a lot of these with my interjections and opening comments.

Note the use of a ‘fake hyphen’ to break names up for reading aloud. The actual name of the capital is Coatzacealcos, but I wasn’t sure of my ability to pronounce that correctly, consistently. Breaking it into two words makes that a LOT easier.

I also wanted to point out that Zantar’s speech patterns have slowly evolved during his time in the campaign. They started as a blend between a perfunctory militaristic style and fortune-cookie oversimplifications of philosophy delivered in an almost-reverent manner, and both tinged with a little melodrama; he loosened up a little, but was still fairly serious and deadpan, both emphasized by an almost shy humility, and has slowly started incorporating more casual human expressions that contrast strongly with his usual style, and are slowly revealing a very dry sense of humor. The dialogue quoted included a perfect example:

“I would surmise that King Rohaz has just lost another pair of his ‘best men’. It is only a matter of time before his leadership is challenged – and even rudimentary magical training should be ample to ensure that the challenge is successful, unless we or someone else stand up for him. Any takers?”

This is not accidental; it reflects growth and change within the character, which have been taking place even though he is an NPC. When I look back at the canned dialogue with which he started, it’s as though a completely different character were speaking. I doubt the players have noticed this, but it’s a reflection of the NPC feeling more at home within the group.

I have been a casual observer of some other campaigns over the years in which an NPC’s personality was set in stone on the character sheet, and their mannerisms and mode of expression were completely predictable five years of weekly play after their introduction. While that made the campaign easier for the GM to handle, it often left the game world feeling like it was a cardboard stage set and not a real place. Not that this factor alone would counteract that; the same ‘unchanging’ philosophy carried through to townships and cities and the like. It doesn’t have to be that way – so let’s take the work out of the problem, and then highlight an unexpected use of the approach, before continuing.

Threshold of awareness of change

The key trick lies in two assumptions: that a certain amount of change has to accumulate before PCs will notice it, a threshold of awareness of change; and that not all characters or locations will change to the same extent over a given period of time.

When I create an NPC or location, I decide how quickly it is changing and evolving. This is a simple numeric value:

0: frozen, unable to change even if they wanted to
1: very slow change
2: slow change
3: typical rate of change
5: changing quickly
8: a very dynamic evolution
10: mercurial rate of change

Every time the NPC or location appear in the campaign, I add that many points to a cumulative total. When it exceeds the threshold of change that I have set, based on the PCs and how observant of such things they are, and how extensively they know the NPC or location, I subtract the threshold from the total and make a quick note of a change within the NPC or the location in the appropriate place within my notes, highlighting it in some fashion so that I know to call attention to it when the PCs next visit the location or meet the NPC – unless circumstances would hide it. These changes tend to be fairly dramatic or obvious.

There are times when an experience is particularly transformative – a major fire in a location, or a profound personal experience for an individual, for example. Depending on the scale of the event, I will temporarily bump the rate of change up a notch or two, accordingly.

When the PCs next encounter the changed person or place, I will add 3 to the rate of change to get a die roll on 3d6 to use in determining if any specific element has been affected by the change. ‘Changing quickly’ (score of 5) thus indicates that there’s an 8 or less chance on 3d6 of any specific detail having change, per visit.

Note that one possible change is to the rate of change itself! I only apply that when there’s’ been an event to justify it – but I’m not above inserting such an event into the location’s history since the PCs were last there in order to do so, if that suits the plot. A new, more vigorous young mayor or nobleman in charge, for example. A new trade route that passes through the location. A new occupation or recognition from a high-placed source. There are endless possibilities.

You don’t have to update the location or character every time they appear, aside from incrementing the accumulated change total, which is a matter of a second or two. It probably takes longer to extract the notes from a clearbook or open the document and find the accumulated score.

The other note to make about this method is that the awareness target is not a fixed value – it gets lower with each visit. That calls for a pair of simple lists – one of places the PCs have visited and one for notable people they have met. For places, I’m talking about more than simply passing through a community – they need to interact with it in some manner, whether that’s visiting the markets or staying overnight in a hotel or inn. The same is true of NPCs – a single conversation is not enough (except in unusual situations). Next to the name is a score for how often the PCs have been there or met the person. At the top of the page goes 30 minus the highest INT score (if I were using the D&D scale) amongst the party after a cultural modifier has been applied to it – that’s the base threshold. Elves, for example, are less likely to notice subtle changes in a human town – their culture has them looking at the wrong things – so a -2 or even -4 modifier would be appropriate. Some races are more sociable than others, and they might get a +2 or even +4.

To get the appropriate threshold, I simply subtract the number of visits from this base threshold.

The strength of this system is that it accumulates many small changes (with the die rolls) while also tracking more substantial changes without making a lot of extra work for the GM. A small change might be that the blacksmith now has a toddler in the household, or has taken a new apprentice, or has added a porch to his workshop. Little stuff. A more substantial change might be that what used to be the Blacksmith’s workshop is now a saddlery, or a bakery; or the walls around the town are being fortified; or there’s an urban beautification project underway, or the local homeless appear to have vanished. A bit sinister, that last!

The bonus that I mentioned: if you apply this system to most species in a game, over time, it becomes really obvious that a long-lived race are not changing at the same pace as the rest of the world. In essence, you can drop Elvish communities (and the like) down a couple of grades relative to the values applied to more short-lived races and create a palpable but inobvious sense of timelessness to them.

More Key Points & Notes

Another point to highlight is the degree to which the campaign background has been woven into the game situation. This does several things: (1) It binds the adventure to the campaign foundations; (2) it gives the players a sense that they are changing the game environment with their actions, making them feel their characters are part of that environment, and their choices matter; and (3) it provides a vector for injecting interest and relevance in both directions – both from the background to the contemporary situation and from the immediate situation to the background. As a bonus, it can make the campaign feel both more epic in scope and more intimate to the PCs, at the same time!

It’s also worth noting that there’s the “official” version of history given to the players, but that different perspectives give different versions and interpretations of history. In this case, the PCs had one version of the story of Mandarin; Maynor had another; and the Rheezok had a third. None of them completely incompatible, but none of them completely consistent, either.

Finally: I’ve highlighted in the narrative the importance of the discovery of the Rheezok to the campaign, but there were a number of secondary purposes embodied in this encounter that should be pointed out. First, there’s the evolution of the relationship between Maynor and the PCs. Second, it shows the PCs (and the players) that those migrated to Earth (and to the Milky Way in general) so that Mandarin’s universe could be sacrificed, during Ragnarok (the alternative was for both to be destroyed) weren’t just humans and humanoids. This provides groundwork for some future encounters that I had planned. Finally, there’s the point that humanoids vastly outnumbered non-humanoids in terms of species within the Empire of Mandarin (and therefore presumably within the milky way galaxy of Earth-Prime and Earth-Regency and most of the other parallel worlds out there), which I wanted to establish – there are several advantages, mechanically and physically, in the humanoid form, and this both justified the campaign history which had lots of humanoid aliens and very few non-humanoids. In fact, 95% of the non-humans encountered were humanoid – even more if you count mermen – and 75% of the remainder were dragons or arachnid species.

Synopsis, Session 10 (from Session 11)

Last Time, or thereabouts, the party told King Rohaz that he was out of a job, but nevertheless owed the party mounts. He grudgingly provided Eljambre, Riding Dinosaurs, as promised. When hyped up on the Speed Fodder that your Diplomatic Escort, Maynor, had brought with him, they proved capable of terrifying speeds. So it was that you soon found yourselves at the capital of the Kingdom of Tabasco, Coatza-cealcos, where your mounts needed to rest.

Maynor gave you each some local walking-around money and pointed you at the local market, with instructions to rendezvous at the Villa Coatza-cealcos de Grande (which lived up to it’s name). Having ridden through the night, a few hours of rest were necessary.

The wonders of the Bazaar, and the local cuisine, entranced some of you, and most of you have walked away with some souvenir of the occasion. After eating, most of you settled down for some sleep, only to awoken some hours later to resume your journey.

Again with augmented speed, you rode the Eljambre to Acayucan, the border between the kingdoms of Tabasco and Veracruz, where your mounts were left in the care of the border guards. Note that the local usage appears to run all three syllables of the latter into a single word.

Veracruz proved a definite step towards the modern age – this Kingdom seemed almost civilized! Each kingdom you’ve passed through, heading north from your landing place in Guatemala, has regressed to a lesser extent – and the way the Magic Muscle provided by Maynor and his associates is used becomes more sophisticated.

The Guatemalans were hunter-gatherers and used their magical benefits to make themselves bigger and tougher bullies and better hunters, and to provide any immediate needs. Tabasco had fallen back to the iron age, and magic was used for construction and simple farming – to make the plants grow large, no matter how poorly they were cared for. Veracruz is in the age of Empires, which in this part of the world means the Aztecs. They have rule by right of inheritance, recognize the value of experts and advisors, have not lost coinage, and use their magic to enhance their infrastructure and land, and to replace manual labor. The growth of plants is left to nature, but a nature that is augmented magically.

In keeping with this ethos, they provided rapid transit through tunnels containing some form of fixed teleport that shrank the distance from tunnel entrance to exit 100-fold. Not all towns in the nation are linked into this network; each is surrounded by a ring of satellite communities where the work of the “Neo-Aztec Empire” is carried on.

Through these tunnels, you have walked for what seems like little more than a kilometer-and-a-half – plus about 4 kilometers of actually walking through the towns in question. It actually feels like you’re walking through a vast and continuous city with short tunnels separating one suburban district from another. In reality, the distance you traveled in that hour or so is about 170 kilometers! All told, it’s taken you about an hour to travel this distance and reach the capital. If it had not been for the extensive delays caused by opportunistic rulers as you earned the right of passage through their territories, the “two or three days to reach the US” initially promised by your escort would begin to sound quite plausible.

You have reached the capital at 3PM, Wednesday July 2nd, almost a day behind schedule. Fortunately, you can expect the demands of the local rulers to at least start to moderate from this point forward, according to Maynor, as the rulers become more sophisticated and enlightened. Your comfort margin has been consumed, but the mission itself is not yet in jeopardy.

That mission: you are to set up a base of operations, establish new identities created by UNTIL as a way around the political sensitivity of the current US situation, then find and recover a pair of nuclear weapons believed purchased on the black market by a domestic terrorist organization with the intention of using them sometime on July 4th to make some sort of political statement, starting by making contact with a deep-cover UNTIL agent.

Once in the capital, you went directly to the palace, where you met Chief Felip-ey Denandes, who was urbane, polite, and relatively charming. After establishing that neither of the women in the party were interested in becoming his third wife, he ordered refreshments and food, while he bent “the staggeringly limited capacities of his inadequate intellect” to the task of deciding on an appropriate task to earn your right of passage.

The mini-adventure that follows is perhaps suitable as a drop-in for many different campaigns – especially for fantasy, but I can see this being reinterpreted for a Space Opera / sci-fi setting without too much difficulty. It’s also so self-contained that it gets very short summation in the next synopsis, so it is not inappropriate that it get a fuller supplementary treatment.

Extracts from the mini-adventure “A Bandit In The Bushes,” as played

“Ah! I have the very thing! Please listen, all of you. Do you know what I have in my hand? Of course not! But I’ll tell you what it is – it’s a report of a semi-competent bandit operating with seeming impunity in the Heroica region. Almost half the tax revenues flowing through that important port town over the last three months have gone missing, and two tax-men have been badly beaten. One almost died; the next one might not be so fortunate. And I don’t like bandits thumbing their nose at authority, and I don’t like semi-competent bandits learning through experience.

“Finding this miscreant should be almost effortless for people of your skill and obvious intellect. Finding out how it is that he has been getting away with it should not be very much more difficult.

“I’ll give you a couple of blank arrest warrants. You run on up there and sort the mess out, arrest anyone you think appropriate for trial, and convey them – forcibly if necessary – to Hueytamalco. I trust the sub-chief there, that’s why I put him in charge of the Royal Prison – so he’ll take them off your hands, take a sworn statement from each of you about your investigation, and you can be on your way. And the best part is that it’s all on your way, anyhow!”

Heroica is 148 km and 5 towns away, so an hour or so’s walking will get you there. At that point it will be about 5PM (if you leave immediately), which will give you just enough daylight to get a more substantial report from the Sub-chief of Heroica and start prowling around under the cover of night.

When you get there, you are Invited to rest by Felix Elanandez, the local Sub-Chief, who seems relatively unconcerned about the Bandit. “Most of the taxes get through.”

When pressed, he will describe a person wearing a black cape, black mask, black hat, and riding a black horse, who likes to climb trees and buildings and leap on unsuspecting taxmen as they pass below. If the taxman has an escort – it’s an obvious precaution – something lures the escort away just long enough to permit the bandit his leaping-and-beating activities. It could be anything from a smoke bomb suggesting that a public building is on fire to a kitten up a tree with a dewy-eyed little accomplice begging for help in rescuing her precious pet.

It’s not known whether or not the bandit always has such measures prepared or if he is somehow getting intelligence about the security precautions that are being taken. He seems able to see through any disguise, though.

This posed a different challenge for the players; actually finding the answers was easy; the PCs not only had a police detective amongst their number, but a telepath. What they needed, though, was evidence that would stand up in court. This is a chestnut that comes up in the campaign every now and then and is always a challenge, sometimes a frustrating one.

It was time for that pair to have the spotlight for a while, which is why I came up with this as a challenge.

The bandit has been getting intelligence from the Sub-chief, who gets half the loot. He has been warned about the arrival of Royal Investigators, with warrants, and is laying low and going about his day job as a chicken farmer.

After capturing the bandit, and finding necessary proof, the PCs returned to the Sub-chief, who invited them to a feast, commencing immediately. They got the impression that he was trying to distract them to give himself time to make a quick getaway. Instead, they arrested him.

They then persuaded the Bandit to turn states’ evidence against the other in return for leniency.

After conveying them to the border town of Hueytamalco for trial, the travelers met the local Sub-chief, Ernesto Sebastian De-humbrey (phonetic), possibly the creepiest person the PCs have ever met. His flesh looks like he’s a drowning victim, and his eyes seem to assess how much skin could plausibly be flayed from them when he speaks.

He is unfailing polite, but has a habit of pausing mid-sentance for a moment that adds to the creepy factor. Nevertheless, he seems to have a penetrating mind and – if the circumstances were different – might have become on of Mexico’s greatest litigators; he’s that good. Much of what he says also reveals a sly sense of humor; he’s well aware of his appearance and plays on it. He invites them to visit the prison (politely declined), then asks, “are you sure I can’t offer you accommodations for the night?”

That ended the mini-adventure and would have been the perfect note on which to end play for the day, but there was too much time left on the clock, so (after a short break) I moved on to start of the next one, planning to use giving of The Task as a cliffhanger.

In Leon, the next Kingdom, the society was Medieval with a Mexican twist, and very Christian. Brief prayer services had to be attended in every town on arrival, less-brief prayer services every two hours wherever you were, and a daily confessional. Church services lasted at least 6 hours every Sunday. King Manuel de Vasquez Jalihandre Nevados was believed by all (including himself) to have been appointed by God to lead the people through their struggles.

Travel in Leon was by non-instant temple-to-temple teleportation, one town to the next; you could not teleport from the same temple that you arrived in. Donations were expected in return for this service, and prayers had to be offered. The average was 5 minutes per town, plus 30 minutes every two hours. King Nevados asked for an hour’s honest labor on the construction of a fortified Temple in the capital, Gonzales, which he judged to be fair.

Key Points & Notes

The shopping at the markets was just a bit of local color. The main takeaway from it is that Specter now has an alternate source of his magic-boosting mana crystals – not good news from the other PCs point of view, as they think he is becoming addicted to them. The other magic items were invented on the spot and not expected or intended to have any long-term relevance – which is why I don’t have notes on what they were.

Since it had been a while since I had done so, I thought it time in this synopsis to touch base with some of the adventure’s background.

I’m not sure what they cryptic comments at the start of the synopsis about “Last Time or thereabouts” are referring to – I know that the real-world play date was some months prior to September of 2020, so perhaps the first Covid-forced interruption here was being referenced – and that would also make it sensible to be a bit more comprehensive than usual in the synopsis. The timing seems about right, given that I wrote my trilogy of articles about the Pandemic in March of that year.

I’m sure that this would also have contributed to the vagueness about the magic treasures – in fact, I now remember being vague about those details while preparing this synopsis since the game play had been so long ago.

This was a game session of NPCs with strong personalities; I wish I had time to expand on that of King Manuel de Vasquez Jalihandre Nevados for readers, as I think he would be a fine NPC to add to many fantasy campaigns. But this post is already approaching record length – and for Campaign Mastery, that’s saying something!

It’s long been a fixture of the game physics that teleportation between two fixed points is technologically much easier and safer, but that all teleportation can be disturbing visually, especially to those prone to motion sickness or certain psychological traumas. It’s also a truism of the campaign that as a general rule what is true of one technique or technology is true of other approaches to the problem. The rapid-transit solution in Leon applied that truism to the campaign physics fixture while using tunnels as a solution to the lesser problems associated with teleportation.

I wish that I had more time to have explored the consequences and ramifications of a Medieval Kingdom in which anyone can be anywhere in 1/100th the time. Picture the impact on freight, of the movement of armed forces, on the bureaucracy and administration, and on any of a dozen other factors. But by the time I was working on this section of the adventure, it was becoming clear that extra time would be needed for more important material that was needed for the chapters that followed.

Lastly, it should be noted that the PCs have had a lot of trouble with various religious elements over the course of the campaign. On Earth-regency, they have been chosen as ‘an easy target’ by a number of televangelists, one of which has even started creating super-villains to attack them – see Pieces Of Creation: Maxima and Minima from back in early 2016.

Synopsis, Session 11 (from Session 12)

The Russian Government, after six years of War with the 4th Reich, are beginning to struggle financially, and are resorting to desperate measures. Like selling some of their obsolete nuclear weapons to arms dealers.

UNTIL got wind of just such a sale to an alliance of domestic US terrorists. Normally they would have simply passed the information on to THUNDER, but there were some indications that the North American version of UNTIL were already compromised.

This put UNTIL in a bit of a bind; it was only a few months away from a critical Federal election that would determine how the US would reintegrate with the rest of the world. The balance was delicately poised, and being seen to pursue any sort of potentially political objective on US soil would, if discovered, tip it disastrously.

Their solution: bring in agents capable of dealing with any problem and give them the cover identities they would need to form a mythical superhero team, designated Team Shadow, who could operate with impunity on American Soil. Of course, this might not be the last time such operatives were needed, and if a thing was worth doing, it was worth doing well, so the plan was to create a resource that could be parachuted in to solve such “problems” long-term. In short, bring in Zenith-3, show them some new ways to use their powers, and disguise them as completely different heroes.

• Blackwing became Basalt, a man transformed into rock.
• Runeweaver became Specter, a ghost from the Revolutionary War.
• Mr Image was recast as Union Jack, who exemplified the indomitable spirit that withstood the Blitz, able to fire blasts of energy from his wrists and equipped with a force-field belt.
• Defender became Zantar, a Kzin tourist rescued by the team who joined up to repay the debt of honor.
• St Barbara assumed the identity of Nightshade, a Ninja-like character, using her powers to perform impossibly-acrobatic maneuvers and throw shuriken of “Shadow Energy”, and
• Vala became Zeitgeist, a character who seemed mostly normal and very human – and hardly noticeable.

Team Shadow were to be inserted into the US using contacts UNTIL had made within the 5th Reich, which turned out to be nothing like the team’s expectations. This was an environment in which everyone knew who all the other spies were, and conducted elaborate games with each other, where favors and obligations were better than money as an item of tradecraft. Dr Muerte, for all his supervillainish personal inclinations and fascist leanings, turned out to be a very effective administrator.

The team made landfall in Guatemala and began their Mexican tour. Post-Ragnarok, the nations of Central America and Mexico had collapsed into a number of much smaller Kingdoms based on the old state lines. The farther south that you looked, the more primitive these societies were – and Team Shadow were starting so far south that they weren’t even in Mexico yet.

A short distance inland, they met the guide and ‘Diplomatic Escort’ from Demon House Aries that Muerte’s Intelligence Officer had arranged for them, Maynor Estuado Morales. Again, he wasn’t quite what they expected; he quickly proved to be urbane and witty, and possessed of a warm charm. The team already knew that House Aries was a little different from the other Houses of Demon, anyway, after they had helped liberate Blackwing from the curse of his Armor, which had been slowly taking over his mind and body.

Maynor explained en route that in return for permission to continue traveling through their respective territories, the rulers of the local Kingdoms would expect the team to perform some service.

These services were usually something minor, but the urgency with which these arrangements had been made was enough that even the thickest, most brutish of the local rulers – Heif Zubal – could tell that Team Shadow were something extraordinary. So far, the services required have included recovering a “Lost Jewel”, hunting “Monsters”, and chasing down a Bandit operating with seeming impunity.

Along the way, you have come to trust Maynor quite a lot, and have confessed your roles as “UNTIL agents with paranormal abilities” to him, and dropped a few leading hints about your mission’s importance. He has agreed to assist in that mission as far as possible, without compromising their political neutrality.

They also reached a treaty with the alien Rheezok for the mutual defense of the Earth against the Ice Queen or other comparable threat; the PCs intend that the Rheezok’s presence be officially sanctioned on humanitarian grounds as they are refugees, but the PCs will have to work with the more progressive elements of the UN to have the emergent nation recognized officially.

Despite the delays that these ‘services’ represent, the team has, since coming ashore, covered 2,275 km, climbing to over 1800m altitude and descending again six times in the process – in 2 days and 8 hours total – and that’s with several hours worth of delays along the way as they undertook these side-quests.

Since you have been told by your guide that the whole trip should take 2-3 days, you think you’re a ways behind schedule, but Specter and Nightshade have a plan to correct that with a little time-travel once you leave your guide behind. So long as you cross the border before Noon of July 4, when UNTIL believes the Nukes are to be detonated, you should be able to give yourself a couple of days to investigate AFTER a week or so spent resting, establishing your new cover identities, and setting up a base of operations deep in the Redneck Heartland.

It is now 3:15 AM, Friday, July 4, so time is beginning to become an issue.

Just over an hour ago, the ultra-pious King Manuel de Vasquez Jalihandre Nevados, Ruler of Leon, tasked you with an hour of your time spent assisting in the reconstruction of a church here in Tampico that has lain in ruins since Ragnarok.

Normally, you would have waited until morning, but because of the press of time, you decided to go to work immediately. Maynor warned that Magic would be used to determine whether or not each was sincerely working as hard as they could, so the cover of Darkness would also enable you to use your full abilities (within the guises of Team Shadow) with relatively low risk of detection.

It worked out well. Nightshade and Zeitgeist cleared rubble from the site while Maynor and Specter dug new foundations, and Union Jack & Zantar poured concrete between the stone slabs carried into place by Basalt. Maynor and Specter took it in turns to speed up the curing of the concrete, so construction took only about half an hour (instead of the months probably expected).

The group then turned their attention to the interior, Maynor, Basalt, and Nightshade producing wooden panels, polishing and varnishing them, then mounting them, while Specter put his new woodworking skills to good use carving pews, Zantar hung silken curtains, and Zeitgeist laid tiles.

By the time you had finished, the Church was ready for decoration with appropriate religious iconography; as soon as that was complete, it would be ready to be blessed and hold Services.

At the end of the appointed time, one of the local priests inspected the work, and seemed to approve, unable to say much more than “It’s a miracle,” repeatedly. He was more than happy to sign off on the group’s efforts.

They then returned to King Manuel’s palace, to be greeted by his rudely-awakened Minister Of The Interior, the Most Excellent (that’s his title) Dominic DeSouza. En route, Maynor had asked you to let him do the talking, in the interests of getting through the formalities as quickly as possible.

After some verbal dancing with DeSouza, Maynor in very florid tones, stated “By this account of progress, duly authenticated by an official of His Majesty’s Church, we do proclaim that we have completed the task assigned us by His Majesty and claim the promised Service – immediate passage through his demesne. We must depart immediately for the border at Gonzales; we have many Leagues to cross in mere hours, and must reach the Train by the hour of four, less than an hour hence. If you will but grant us passage in His Majesty’s name!”

This contained the first hints of what was to come on the next leg of their journey, but it didn’t seem possible for a Steam Train (which is what the group expected that they would find) could possibly even come close to the implied speed required to make their schedule.

The King instructed DeSouza to comply, stating that “Lord Maynor” had previously made the need for haste clear to the monarch. The King’s words made it seem that Maynor was his social inferior, but his parting words revealed a more complex relationship between the two: “You may depart, Lord Maynor. And you may rest assured that I have spoken to those who run the railroad at Gonzales. Though they do not acknowledge Our sovereign authority, the heathens, they have indicated that they will hold the mechanical monstrosity for you – if you aren’t too late, that is.”

As the group departed the palace, Maynor commented to himself, “It never fails – a good man gets religion and becomes overburdened with pomposity. But he remains a good man.”

Key Points & Notes

It’s noteworthy that I also reached right back to the briefing at the beginning of the “Spy Games” phase of the adventure to incorporate reminders of some aspects of the adventure backstory that had not been mentioned in previous synopses, such as the role played in the situation of the Russian government.

The task given to the players in Leon – spend an hour working to rebuild a temple – was so simple that they all knew there was going to be a twist in the story. But I left it until they were actually en route to the temple to let Maynor drop the other shoe – magic would be used to verify that each had put in an ‘honest hour’s work’, laboring as hard as they could. That meant one thing in terms of the ordinary people they appeared to be, and quite another when their paranormal abilities were factored in – nor could Maynor offer any confidence. They decided that they had to play it safe, and work as hard as they could with those abilities, and sort out any fallout afterwards. They suspected that the King thought them all Mages like Maynor, and had chosen his ‘task’ accordingly.

Another key point in my planning of this mini-campaign was that each of these mini-adventures should be distinctly different from each other, posing different challenges to the PCs. The first was a combat romp, the second was a diplomatic mission (though they didn’t know that when it started), the third was a detective yarn, and this was a ‘domestic life’ story.

Finally: there’s a lot of scope to gloss things over in synopses, and that’s what happened with the next synopsis. To fill in some of the resulting blank spaces, I have once again excerpted material from the adventure, as prepped for play (except that I’ve redacted most of the references to illustrations, which can’t be presented here for copyright reasons).

Synopsis of play in Session 11, with Excerpts and annotations

The party reached the border at Gonzales at 3:55 AM. After presenting their credentials and the scrawled note from the minister of the interior, they were permitted through the stone gates that separate The Kingdom of Leon from the Republic Of Coahuila.

“We must hurry,” Maynor said. “The train leaves in just four minutes – and if they hold it, no matter what they promised Dominic DeSouza, I’m a roast avocado. This way!!”

When you mix widespread magical expertise and capability, ‘weird’ refugees from another dimension making themselves at home, and a Victorian society, what you get isn’t the age of steam – it’s the age of steampunk!

I thought that fairly obvious – but nevertheless, somehow managed to surprise my players with the development.

The ‘roast avocado’ reference was a somewhat clumsy attempt to remind the players that Maynor has made himself at home in California, but I didn’t have time to actually research turns of phrase from the period that were common in that state.

You barely have time to notice your surroundings, which are a strange blend of the modern, the magical, the Victorian, and the Mexican. A formal carriage passes you down the cobbled street drawn by a team of 8 burros while a Victorian automobile driven by an Orangutan in some sort of uniform waits to turn at the corner, held back by a policeman in a sombrero.

Maynor leads you to a building that appears to be made of glowing red bricks. As you get closer, you can see that the bricks are actually some sort of glass which traps glowing red embers and flames.

Instinctively, you turn toward the large wooden doors. “No, this way,” says the Sorcerer. “Those lead to the Waiting Room, a labyrinth from which none ever escape; they are perpetually waiting for their train to board. We go in here,” he adds, pointing at a smaller and less impressive doorway. “Our tickets are pre-booked in the name of M. E. Morales.”

Turning to Nightshade, he tells her to collect the tickets while the rest take care of the bags. “He’s a zombie, so he shouldn’t give you any trouble.”

He then begins pulling suitcases of different sizes out of thin air and handing them to the rest of you. “The railroad staff think it suspicious if someone travels without luggage. I’ve learned long ago that it saves headaches to prepare some illusionary suitcases. Now, let’s look for a porter, and remember to look disapproving when we find one…”

I wanted to make entry into this environment an experience, not something superficial; that meant hitting the PCs over the head with the uniqueness of the environment at a breathless pace. This also had the benefit of exemplifying the differences between a more ‘modern’ urban atmosphere – the pace of ‘the big city’ – and the more bucolic semi-rural state from which they were departing. In wanting to make the contrast sharp, I was able to take advantage of it in many ways at the same time.

In the process, a locale and set of characters that didn’t even exist when I outlined the adventure became so unique and significant that I expect them to recur at critical moments in the future – key campaign building blocks around which future plotlines can pivot. That wasn’t then intent – it’s total bonus.

It also gave me an opportunity to indulge an exuberance and sense of whimsy that doesn’t often get a chance to manifest itself in this particular campaign. “Please look into the ocular implant”!

Zombie Ticketmaster, Goblin Porters, and Ogre Conductor – all got a moment of spotlight that helped ‘ground’ the Steampunk environment.

The train itself was enormous; the engine was easily four times the size of any that the PCs had seen before. Maynor led them to a compartment that took up half the carriage. “That’s for three of you; you can get some sleep after the conductor clips your tickets. The table folds back and the couch becomes a second bed,” he added, “and we’ll be in the next compartment if you need anything. Breakfast will be ready at 7 AM.”

The furniture was ultra-soft, ultra-comfortable. There was a heavy-handed knock at the door; a partition in it then slid open to reveal a gauze screen with an opening in it’s base, and a deep voice half-growls, half-snarls, “Tickets, Please.” When the tickets are handed over, the 8′ tall 450-lb conductor scrutinizes them slowly through his spectacles. Finally satisfied, he punches holes in them in some arcane pattern that only railroad employees would understand, and hands them back. “The Dining Car will be open at 7. Use the bell-pull beside the door if you wish the Porters to fetch you anything from the luggage compartment. Complimentary toiletries and nightclothes are in the wardrobe. We are due to reach Monterrey at 8:15 AM. The train will then continue to Torreon and Gonzales via Zacatecas, Aqua Scalientes, and Tampico, arriving at its final destination at 9:21 this evening, ready to be cleaned and prepared for tomorrow’s service after a round trip of 403 Leagues.” In a pained tone of voice, he concludes with, “Enjoy your travels on Coahuila Rail.”

Meanwhile, Maynor was critiquing Specter’s spell-casting, having (correctly) determined that the mage was at least partially self-taught. It shows. “Some things seem to come to you easily, while others are harder than they need to be. There are techniques and elementary theory taught to all students in the Academies Of Magic in my former home. I do not have the time to instruct you formally, but I observed how interested you were in what the Rheezok were teaching. I can offer a crash course in one or two tricks that might make a difference at some point. And I cannot accept Nightshade’s word on how important your mission is without doing all I can to ensure success. It will be difficult; I do not have time to treat you as a Novice. Are you interested, and are you willing?”

This was an important character development point for both of them. I wanted to emphasize that Maynor was a lecturer in Magic that had been educated in a system that taught the subject to a University standard, while the PC was – essentially – a gifted, powerful, novice in many ways, while giving the PC additional knowledge of how the magic system worked “in-game”.

Since it’s a principle of this campaign that the ‘in-game physics’ overrides and overrules game mechanics whenever its necessary and reasonable for it to do so – in other words, that the game mechanics were an imperfect simulation of the ‘objective’ reality of the game universe – this was effectively telling the player that there were additional things that the ‘game universe’ would permit his character to do.

The fact that the principles that were to be expounded and their logical consequences all stemmed from the most recent revision to the game mechanics simply made everything dovetail more neatly. In particular, some constraints that had been incorporated for game balance reasons would be explained in terms of that in-game physics.

The carriages were hinged about a central axis, permitting them to stay level when the train rounds a bend.

From memory, this was actually something that I picked up from a Quora answer about traction in a 4WD vehicle. It permits the solid-axle wheels to be at different angles relative to each other, both in the plane parallel to the carriage floor, and in the vertical plane.

The bends are banked to permit greater speed. Now that it’s light enough to see what’s happening, the whole thing is terrifying; Nightshade, you would estimate the train’s top speed as 200 mph. That’s nothing when you’re flying, but it’s a heck of a lot when you aren’t. What’s more, you estimate the average speed as more than 120 km/h. On poorly-maintained Mexican standard gauge. With a train four times as tall as most.

In due course, the train pulled into the station in Monterrey, which was to be the PC’s stop.

Key Points & Notes

I actually have nothing to add – I’ve covered it all in my annotations! Time for another map, though…

Synopsis, Session 12 (from Session 13)

Team Shadow have been dragged from one end of Mexico to the other by their guide and ‘Diplomatic Escort,’ Maynor Morales of Demon House Aries, battling Lava Gods and Dinosaurs, concluding peace treaties with Alien sorcerers, and performing one task after another to earn passage through the Principalities that comprise the former nation of Mexico.

Now, only one task remains before they can cross the border into the United States Of North America and begin the next phase of this critical mission. To find out what it is, they have taken a magically-enhanced train, traveling in relative luxury for a change.

While most of the team were able to get a couple of hours of long-overdue sleep, Maynor had deduced that Specter was a largely self-taught Mage and took the opportunity to cram as much of what he had been taught at Mandarin’s Academy Of Magic into an intense tutorial, covering topics including Mana Curdles, Stealth Spellcasting, Mana Exhaustion, Mana Voids, Suspended Casting, Mana Tags, Elementary Summoning, The Principles of Advanced Summoning, Mana Combustion, Greater Voids, and Dimensional Fissures.

Time is beginning to press quite heavily; you need to cross the border into the USNA by Noon at the latest if you are going to be able to stop the suspected Domestic Terrorists from detonating their black market nuclear weapons.

It is now 8:18 AM, Friday the 4th of July, 1986, and the group have just arrived at the local capital, Monterrey.

Key Points & Notes

Keeping the synopsis short adds to the sense of urgency – a trick that I’ve mentioned (and made use of) before..The critical thing to do is ensure that you’ve included everything important.

If that list of “lecture topics” sounds familiar, it’s because those “lessons” were extracted and published here at Campaign Mastery, in The Meta-Physics Of Magic about three weeks after the fact – time spent adding in some of the foundation information that had already been established in the campaign.

That date of publication gives a correlation between real-world time and the timeline of game sessions, noting that there have been significant disruptions to the regular gaming schedule caused by Covid-19 Lockdowns.

Those also have an impact on the synopses from time to time; those which were intended to be delivered after a disruption need to be a little more comprehensive just to help reorient the players. At the same time, efforts were in place to keep them to a reasonable length – even though those are mutually-incompatible goals!

Synopsis, Session 13 (with excerpts from the Day’s Play)

This synopsis is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, a hybrid of the actual synopsis used in session 14 and excerpts from the day’s play, both as planned and as it actually happened.

The party were expected at the Presidential Palace because Morales had telephoned them back in Gonzales. So, they caught a taxi.

The vehicle which has just lumbered around the corner at 110 miles per hour is, perhaps, the most unlikely contraption you have ever beheld. A motorized tricycle with a canvas roof that seems to be built around the rear end of a 1930s green convertible tows a wooden double-decked carriage which would comfortable accommodate a dozen passengers. The steam engine mounted to the rear of the tricycle doesn’t have any visible burner or boiler, seeming to operate on clean thoughts alone. A neon-green sign on the side of the carriage burns brightly even in the light of day.

The driver leans out of his well-padded covered seat, a black sombrero pulled low and his head angled to keep the morning sun out of his eyes and replies “Hola, Amigos, Miguel is your driver today! Diende puedo llevarte esta buena masana? Where to?”

The Driver is as remarkable as his vehicle. A copper-colored lizard, black dining suit, white shirt, red bow tie, and a red rose in his lapel.

As the taxi sets off at breakneck pace, you realize that it has unsophisticated leaf-spring suspension. At speed, the ride promises to be on the uncomfortable side.

Maynor took the opportunity to sneak in some additional lecture notes on magic use, while complaining about not having any prepared lecture notes.

In the Campaign Mastery article, these were incorporated into the text as thought they had all been presented at the same time. In actual play, there were interruptions between almost every section so that the spotlight could look over the other PCs.

Meanwhile, in the carriage below, the occupants have had more time to soak up the uniqueness of Monterrey and the way they employ Magic, as passing views through the windows as the taxi bounces along toward it’s destination at insanely high speeds.

You pass a construction site at which a steel skeleton is being erected without the use of cranes, levitating Girders into place, and in some cases, twisting and bending them into curving forms which are carefully checked against a template that also hovers in mid-air.

I am a strong advocate for the premise that those with ‘special powers’ would find ways to incorporate the casual use of those powers into their daily lives. This holds as true for Class Features in D&D as it does superhero paranormal abilities. Mr Fantastic doesn’t get up to get a cup of coffee – he twists his neck so he’s facing rearward to see what he’s doing and stretches his arms (one holding the coffee-cup) to the percolator, all without leaving his chair. The Human Torch roasts marshmallows with his fingertips. The Invisible Girl should use a force-field coffee-cup, and so on.

Past the construction site, you watch, fascinated, as small, puffy, clouds are formed by a steam engine and marshaled into neat ranks in tidy lines. A series of devices that look something like oversized shower heads pump additional moisture into each, fattening and darkening it until it is ready to be deployed – presumably to a nearby farm.

Across the road, a craftsman is busy making fancy cowboy boots. Nine stands have been set up, side by side, and identical pieces of raw leather placed in the same position on each. As you watch, the one craftsman begins cutting the leather into shape, turning the piece of leather as he does so. On either side of him, four leather knives waft into the air and make identical movements to that of the tool in the craftsman’s hand; the pieces of leather turn at the same time as leather in front of him. By the time he is finished, he will not have one pair of shoes; he will have nine. A little further down the street, a potter works six wheels at once, turning out vases.

Another vendor creates neon-like fireworks in the air in the shape of the stars and stripes to advertise that he has the latest in American convenience products for sale “Muy Cheapo!” This raises an interesting thought for Nightshade – could it be that the major reason why this part of Mexico has recovered so visibly is not just that they are using magic to benefit the populace and economy as a whole, but that they are engaging in trade with the US – whether the nation is recognized as legitimate or not? Presumably, Mexican labor is also producing nick-knacks for the American market, and using Magic to improve their productivity to a level with which the Americans can’t compete. Since Coahuila presumably also trades with its’ neighbors, who trade with their neighbors, progress would be slowly seeping through the Central Americas, diluted with each exchange but accumulating, nevertheless.

Conceptually, this was a direct steal from Asimov’s Foundation series, in which the notion that trade could be a civilizing force all on its own. But the expressions of that principle are completely different.

From time to time, you spot masked people in bright green scrubs touching wands to people in obvious physical distress, who appear to recover almost immediately from their ailments. A sandwich-board sign nearby reads “Atencion de la salud publica, gratuita”, which the education you received through the mechanical educator quickly translates to “Public Health Care, Free”. A broken limb is healed as you watch.

That explains why you weren’t seeing the poor and downtrodden that you might have expected to find – restoring them to health permits them to find work and climb out of poverty, at least in relative terms, a very Scandinavian philosophy. St Barbara approved, quite vocally!

Of course, in the real world, this would not be enough; it’s often not health that holds the underprivileged back. But it would be a massive boost to the middle classes, which would then put more money into the economy, which could then be used to address some of the other problems faced by the poor, homeless, and hurt.

Much of the thinking behind the utilization of magic in this environment stemmed from “A Magical Medieval Society” which I bought many years ago through RPGNow. There’s an updated version that’s come out since, and at least one sequel. Again, the premise is that if you can do something, you would use that ability to achieve more in every aspect of your life to which you could apply it. Even being more efficient in your job creates more time for you to improve yourself, spend with family, etc – unless your working hours are not reduced commensurately, in which case they become additional profits for the business owners, fueling an economic disparity.

Today’s economic and social problems are always caused (at least in part) by yesterday’s mistakes. no matter how well-meaning, just as tomorrow will pay for the mistakes being made today.

The taxi reached the Presidential Palace, a vast and opulent building with people streaming in and out along a white marble walkway. The driver asked which entrance they wanted to use, and was directed to take them to the “Ambassadorial Reception Plaza” – which told the PCs that they should take a moment to clean themselves up and make sure that they were presentable.

The driver asked if they had the necessary diplomatic credentials, receiving an affirmative from Maynor; in the previous kingdoms, he had seemed to combine a role as “supervisor” with a lax, almost casual diplomatic role; because the Kingdoms themselves weren’t legally recognized, the team had not given that a second thought.

This sounded rather more formal, and reminded them that there was a considerable gap between what governments recognized “officially” and the reality on the ground that had to be acknowledged and applied practically. With trade (however unsanctioned and unofficial) across the border to the US, and with House Aries connections into the US Government and relations with the Government here, the Republic Of Coahuila must be on the verge of full diplomatic recognition. And, once one former Mexican state had such recognition, it would be that much harder to deny the others – something the PCs noted rather carefully given their promises to the Rheezok.

Union Jack had another take on the situation; he wondered what the probability was that such a person would be ‘randomly chosen’ to act as their escort and guide? Either the 5th Reich had a lot more political clout than seemed likely, or this diplomatic ‘beat’ was Morales full-time job, or news of their identities/mission had leaked. Discounting the first, that left a chance that the team was in trouble they hadn’t even noticed yet. The diplomatic ‘dance’ when they reached the palace might be very informative, and he resolved to pay even closer attention than he normally would have.

The Presidential Palace turned out to be a complex of buildings with a common facade, permitting it to be completely rebuilt or restructured and the public would never know.

It quickly became evident that Maynor was no stranger to the palace, and was well-known to the key figures in the local government. The party were escorted to the Palace Waiting Room, which would not look out of place in the Versailles Palace. Beginning with the obvious alien (Zantar), their escort began taking drinks orders. The second person he approached was Zeitgeist, who looks human (but isn’t); he recommended the 8,000-year-old quartz suspension, he understands that it is very popular with the Golems who have similar dietary preferences. It is immediately obvious that the staff have read them like a book – even those whose race they had never encountered before.

Maynor shakes his head as the Butler departs. “Before you ask, no, I don’t know how he does it, either – but he’s unerring at selecting those who have traveled the greatest distance from their homes, and a nit-picker when it comes to protocol. I suspect that he’s also the head of the Centro de Investigacion y Seguridad, Mexican Intelligence. Right now, while others prepare the drinks, he will be preparing President daSilva for the meeting.”

“When the President is ready, Carenza will come and get us. This is a formal occasion to the locals – after all, the other nations of the world don’t recognize his Presidency as legitimate, so he doesn’t get to play diplomatic host very often. I’ve found it’s more efficient in the long run to let them get it out of their systems before getting down to business.”

Sure enough, maids and junior butlers – each the opposite of your apparent gender – soon deliver your drink orders on silver trays with a bow or a curtsy. They then stand unobtrusively in the shadows near your elbows, waiting to remove the empty glassware when you’ve finished, or refills, as necessary.

Five minutes later, Carenza returns and leads them to the Presidential Office. You make quite a procession – the elderly butler, so much more than he seems, followed by Maynor, then the rest of you in a group, followed by servants with silver trays for any of you who had not finished your drinks, and servants with napkins for those of you who have.

Carenza leads you into another large and opulent chamber, which includes a large throne, and a business desk off to the side. When the group was arranged in a semicircle according to assumed rank (the same order in which your drinks orders were taken), three men in blue uniforms enter and raise trumpets to their lips before blowing a brief fanfare, which concludes with the crash of cymbals from a second trio. The doors open on the crash, and a man in expensive robes with a long train enters. This must be President daSilva. It’s hard to judge his age – he could be 50, and prematurely gray, or a well-preserved 70. Large rimless square glasses are perched upon his nose. He strides confidently to the throne and sits, cradling his hands in an attentive pose.

Greetings were exchanged between the King and Maynor, and verbal fencing between the two then followed for a few minutes, the upshot being that the two get along but have to pretend otherwise for the sake of formality, and so haggle endlessly about services rendered, debts, and payments. After a while, having ticked all the officially-required boxes, the conversation becomes more personal and friendly. It turns out that the Rose (wine) that the President had asked Morales to evaluate was a local product, part of an ongoing attempt to create an upmarket Wine industry. The King’s conversation is full of hints to a humorous side, a sly wit that he doesn’t get to parade publicly.

Maynor then gets to the point: “Senor Presidente, I know your intelligence service enjoys a challenge. Rather than presenting you with false identities, permit me to simply introduce you to the group whose transit brings me into your presence at this time. Their passage has been arranged as a personal favor to Senor Muerte of Brazil; any diplomatic rank that they may display at this time derives completely from that association. They may have, however, some small influence in other official circles.”

With a sweeping gesture, the President says to the five of you, “I bid you welcome to the glorious Republic Of Coahuila, Senors and Senoritas. The Oracle has, of course, warned me of your coming. I understand that King Rohaz has been displaced in favor of a more progressive Regime, and that a strong case may soon be mounted for the long-overdue recognition of the Sovereign Nations of what was once a united Mehico.”

This showed that the President was right up to date on current events despite the lack of modern communications between the Kingdoms, and opened several eyes wide at the game table.

“Formal Recognition of the Kingdom of Tabasco may soon occur. Should you make overtures to those who now rule there, a positive diplomatic relationship should result. A joint submission to the United Nations for formal recognition is far more likely to succeed. The Principality of Leon would also join with you in this endeavor; which would force acknowledgment of the other Kingdoms as well.”

And the reply showed that while the players had been hatching vague plans about formal recognition of the Kingdoms, Maynor had been orchestrating a more substantial and concrete plan. He was so affable in casual mode that his diplomatic skills kept surprising the PCs; every time that happened, the respect the PCs had for the NPC went up a notch. Every time that has happened in the past, the NPC has ended up being recruited by them – something that wouldn’t be possible, politically, even if he could accept such an offer. So this was a novel position for them to be in. Remember that ostensibly and officially, he was an enemy of theirs!

“That would be well. Lack of assistance from the other nations of the World delays recovery from the Dias de fuego y hielo, which they call Ragnarok.”

“You seem well-acquainted with the only news of significance that I have to offer. So, we have need of further travels within your realm. There is considerable demand for urgency in this matter. Your Northern Borders and trade across them may be At Risk should we fail.”

“So the Oracula has advised me. However, she has also insisted on reading each member of the group you escort. Since she knew when you would arrive, she will be here at any moment.”

A strident knocking comes rhythmically from the doors to the Throne Room. “And here is the Senora now!”

Maynor whispers to the rest of you, “I had hoped to avoid this, but did not really expect to be able to do so – not after the incident with the Rheezok. Your passage has had considerable impact on the Latin Americas even without that, but the importance of that fact sealed the deal, I’m afraid. Don’t be afraid of the Oracle; she is no mere fortune-teller, but is a true Seer. She will see through most disguises, but will recognize your need for secrecy – and probably the reasons for it – and speak circumspectly. She will probably offer personal guidance – you may wish to pay close attention to her insights.”

Slowly the doors to the throne room open. On the threshold stand a quartet that you will never forget. Two of the number are more than 7 feet tall, made up to look like the death-representations from the Day Of The Dead celebrations, in black robes and silver-trimmed hoods. Between them is a tall thin woman wearing a mask which seems to completely block her sight. Before her is a boy of perhaps eight years age, with Central American face paint and a blue feathered headdress. His eyes are remarkable pools of blue that match the glowing orb resting in the woman’s hand.

The way they move is just as remarkable – the escorts movements are all in perfect unison, as though one mind controlled both bodies. The woman doesn’t seem to have legs at all; her skirt falls fully to the floor and flows as though there were nothing of substance beneath it. And the young boy walks normally – if walking normally can be done from almost a foot above the floor, where he stands on insubstantial nothing.

At some unspoken signal, the Escorts take up positions opposite each other on the far sides of the Throne Room, while the child and woman circle around to face Maynor and the group.

“These are the foretold Visitors Of Note – Visitantes Destacados – who are not who they seem,” announces the boy, stating it as a fact, in a strangely deep voice that seems to come from very far away, as he moves to walk to one side of the woman and slightly behind her.

The pair approach Maynor, and appear to look at him closely. They then turn to face other, and you have the distinct impression that communications flow between them even though not a word is said – or can be heard telepathically “This one we know already,” says the boy. “His feet are already on the path unto greatness. Hail and welcome, son of the Mandarin Empire. We once again offer you citizenship bereft of pretense, though we know you will not and cannot accept it.”

“Buenos Diaz, Senorita, and Gracias. Una vez mas debo rechazar tu oferta,” replies Maynor – “I must once again decline your offer.” You get the impression that somehow the boy is lending voice to the woman’s words, and not speaking on his own at all.

Next, the pair place themselves in front of Zantar. “We greet The Sword Of Honor, purified in the flame of darkness and small visions. The great hope of all that is noble, a decision lies heavily upon his heart. Senor, trust that the universe will not permit a wrong choice – only a foolish one.” Zantar’s tail slashes the air back and forth and then seems to wilt as the words sink in. He mumbles “Hola Senorita and Gracias for the advice.”

The duo then come to Zeitgeist. “A Vidente of a different nature to ourselves. A child with a Mind of Mirrors, hard as steel – but a heart soft as a pillow, though she denies it even unto herself. A Truth will wound her deeply when it is discovered. If she can forgive the unforgivable, she may shine as brightly as the Northern Star.” Zeitgeist, they aren’t using Telepathy, and you are fairly certain that Zantar would have reacted differently if their powers had been Chi-based. It’s probably magic, given the widespread use of that art.

Because she considers you a fellow Seer – that’s what Vidente means – the child then opens a window into the Oracle’s mind for you to glance inside. Zeitgeist didn’t hesitate to accept the implied invitation – doing so might be considered rude, and if there was a quartet she did not wish to alienate, this was them.

She found that the four were not individuals at all, but four parts of a whole, a true Gestalt. The woman sees the ‘shape’ of past timelines, while the child sees the ‘shape’ of the future. But these prophetic abilities are not Magical in nature; they have no idea where they came from or how they work.

The two guards act as both protection and reference library; one is a Historian and expert in Politics and Economics, while the other has Doctorates in Physics, Biology, and half-a-dozen other scientific fields.

Each of the four is a mage but they don’t consider themselves the equal of someone like Runeweaver or Maynor in arcane talent.

She was also vaguely aware that they are from widely-separated places – the boy is Brazilian, the woman Mexican, and the Guards are Spanish and Finnish, respectively – so the story of how they found each other and became a unified whole is likely to be a fascinating one.

Before she could even think of looking into that, however, the ‘window’ was closed, and the Oracle moved on.

The third member of the group deriving from off-world, Union Jack, then follows. “The Unlikely Happenstance,” the Oracle names him, “who doubts the rightness of his place in this company. Those doubts may destroy him or he may rise above them to earn a place of respect he cannot now even glimpse. If he survives to see his world aflame, he may become a candle in the darkness. Of all here, his fate is the most uncertain the most quickly.” He thanks he for sharing her wisdom, but still sounds uncertain.

The fourth member to face this probing examination is Nightshade: “The burden of fate lies heavy on the shoulders of this one. She is The Fire incarnate. It may ease your burden, Senora, to know that your efforts will never be in vain, even should they fail, so long as your heart and purpose remain pure.”

Second-last is Specter. “This one has the potential to be a Mighty Oak, perhaps even the greatest practitioner of the Arts in all human existence, but only through great sorrow and suffering will this potential be unlocked. Therefore, Earnest Mage, renew thy peace each day, and let the morrow be of care on the morrow. Wonders await thee, should you succeed in this.” They aren’t using Magic, Specter, or at least, not any magic that you recognize.

Finally, Basalt: “The Heart of their Alliance, released from a terrible curse but recently, and still discovering what remains of his soul and what has been lost. He shall be the Shield Of Truth but must learn anew to trust himself.”

The Boy and woman then turn to face the President. “These are The Ones. All will unfold as foretold. Together, they will perform a great service for Coahuila. You should assist them.” the boy announces. Then the quartet reform without a word, and again moving in their unique manner, depart the Throne Room.

Once again, deep knowledge of the characters and discussions with their owners was the basis of this character analysis. But this also connected back to the character-based beginning of the whole adventure.

After watching the quartet depart, President daSilva says, “I have learned to trust the Wisdom of the Oracle. She foresaw your coming, and that haste would benefit Coahuila. Custom demands that a task be performed to earn permission to journey further through these lands, but I felt justified in taking that foretelling to heart.

“Still, I must still bow to custom or risk the disfavor of the spirit world – not to mention my many political rivals, who are always eager to undermine my rule and strengthen their own claims on the Presidential Palace.

“A task has been chosen accordingly.

“You shall travel to Escobedo, not far from here. You will assist in the loading of certain boxes of custom-built parts that await dispatch from the Precision Engineering Works. You will transport these to Doctor Esperanza at the Rosita Plasmic Works in Neuvo Rosita, and assist in their unloading and unpacking. The required task will then be considered complete.’

Maynor immediately protests. “El Presidente, Neuvo Rosito is more than 300 kilometers away, and does not lie on a straight path toward the border at Neuvo Laredo. We will then be faced with another journey of perhaps 200 kilometers to reach that point from which we may access the nation to the North. I thought you understood the need for urgency – this task may be simple, but it will take us all day!”

“You are incorrect, Senor. This IS the task that the Oracle has insisted you MUST perform to earn passage. But I do understand the need for haste, or at least that there are advantages to my country in permitting haste on your part.

“My rivals would not permit me to assist you without clear proof of your claimed need, Muy Amigo. But, should haste in the task assigned be of proven advantage to the Republic, they will wail and whine, but be unable to mount any serious protest.

“The Presidential Pneumatic will transport you to the Factory in Escobedo. From there, after collecting the parts, you will board the Clippership Peregrine, the fastest vessel within the Republic, which is already en route to meet you at the Factory. It will convey you directly to Neuvo Rosito. After you complete your task, you may then return the Clippership to Neuvo Laredo, where a vehicle better suited to sensibilities North of the border will await you.

“Direct travel to the border by the fastest vehicle you could easily find in Monterrey would take the best part of four hours. My way involves only 50 minutes travel in total, plus stoppage time – perhaps 20 minutes, perhaps 30. It will be much faster, I assure you.”

Maynor, now calmer, replies, “It seems I have underestimated your wiles, El Presidente. Very well.”

“You will be unable to use your arts to speed this task in any way, Senor. The parts under your care are very delicate and would be damaged if you were to do so. They must be loaded and unloaded by means of physical strength. There are those who might seek to interfere or delay you; in this way, you will certainly out-pace them.

“These components are desperately needed for Dr Esperanza’s work. She will explain it far better than I can. Until we meet again, then, Senor, I wish you and your companions Buena fortuna y salud – Good Fortune and Health.”

Maynor replies on behalf of your all, “And to you, El Presidente.”

“Carenza will escort you to the Pneumatic,” concludes the President as he gathers his train and leaves the room in what must be a blatant breach in protocol to judge from the shocked expressions of the servants.

Whew, there’s a lot to unpack from those adventure excerpts. First, excluding the Oracle, only one or two members of the Republic’s government were mentioned or named – but there was enough going on that this wasn’t really noticed. My first draft outline had a couple of others, including a political rival, making appearances, but those got redacted because they weakened the impact of first, the relationship between Morales and President daSilva, and second, the Oracle. It was a choice between focusing on the internal Politics of Coahuila or on the Oracle’s prophecies and descriptions of the PCs and their statuses; I chose the latter.

Part of the reasoning was that by this point I had recognized how compelling a location and set of trappings my Steampunk version of Coahuila could be, within the campaign. And, through the Oracle, I now had a new tool to speak directly to the characters if I had no other way of moving a plot forward. There would be plenty of time for internal politics.

In crafting those prophecies and visions, I actually looked ahead to the very end of the campaign, as it is currently anticipated to be, and the roles that the various team members would have in resolving the cataclysm that the players refer to as “Ragnarok II”, and the experiences that would lead to those roles. These were ‘first hints’ at everything to come.

More importantly, this progressed the overall plotline of the campaign forward. It’s worth momentarily recapping everything that had been integrated into the campaign for the future by this point:

• The political situation in the US;
• The ad-hoc routing around political roadblocks accepted by UNTIL;
• The Fifth Reich as something other than an enemy;
• The political situation in Mexico and Central America, post Ragnarok, and making the PCs the instruments of advancing that political situation as they saw fit to do;
• The Rheezok;
• Coahuila as a setting;
• President daSilva and his staff;
• The Oracle; and
• Unexpected progress in the main campaign plotline.

If that were the full extent of the objectives for this adventure, it was more than long enough to justify everything else attached to it. It wasn’t; that was only the beginning.

Which brings me to another piece of content that might be of value to some GMs out there: the “Pneumatic”…

As the elderly butler escorts you to the “Pneumatic”, he tells you what to expect – though he’s vague on the details. In essence, it’s an ultra-high-speed train, riding through a vacuum trapped in a tube of thickened perspex and driven by – essentially – a steam explosion in the tube behind it. A literal “Bullet Train”. The President backed the research and construction personally, and hoped that it would represent a next-generation technology that could be exported to the rest of the world; but it’s carrying capacity proved far too limited for that. Nevertheless, as a means of getting the President and an adviser or Commander to or from the Palace to the scene of a problem, it has proven sufficiently valuable that it has been retained and extended – anywhere in the capital city is mere minutes away from the Palace. He’s never ridden it.

The Pneumatic itself appears to be two parts joined by a collar; one part is polished silvery steel and extremely streamlined, while the other appears to be a mixture of steel, gold, and brass.

This section continues the lines of the front section and contains an aircraft-style plug door. Inside, there is a vestibule area leading to the passenger compartment. Surprisingly, this is currently in the nose of the contrivance and shaped as a cylinder with rounded ends. The surprise is because, from the outside, a row of darkly-tinted windows were visible in the rear of the device, well behind the rear of the passenger area.

A line of attendants stands ready to assist each of you in preparing for what Maynor’s description makes sound like a very violent departure. Each of them gives each of you essentially the same spiel, so I’ll only run through it once.

“This vehicle accelerates to a speed of 565 km per hour in one-tenth of a second. That is almost eight times the fastest speed of the fastest racehorse, and of course, your trip will be over much more than a quarter-mile. So violent and rapid is this gain in speed that your body will weigh about 160 times what it normally does for that fraction of a second. An 80kg man will have the weight of almost 159 copies of himself pressing down on him, and will feel like he weighs 12,800 kilos.

“Making this experience one that is survivable has dictated the design of everything within this compartment and the safety procedures. Understand that the vehicle is designed to be unable to depart should they not be strictly complied with.

“The seating is of the softest leather backed with steel. They are designed to recline to an angle of 60 degrees to the vertical and to lock in place until it is safe for passengers to stand. There are adjustable recesses in the foot-stand; feet must be placed in them and the wells narrowed until they grip the feet sufficiently firmly. Doing so will cause the chair to recline and lock into place automatically. This, in turn, will cause a pressure-mask containing a bit, again wrapped in soft leather, to unfold from the headrest. Pull it to your mouth and bite down on it; this prevents you accidentally biting off your tongue and forces you to breathe pure oxygen, which assists in preventing unconsciousness and brain damage.

“When it registers that it is being bitten into with sufficient force, the pressure mask will tighten to clamp the jaws in place. This will release a pair of padded panels to either side of the headrest, which must be folded up until they hold the head securely.

“I will then secure you by doing up a five-point harness and pulling it tight; this is made of reinforced spiderweb. It has a quick release which you may employ when it is safe to do so, as indicated by the green light at the front of the compartment. The mask and other restraints may then be removed or loosened. However, passengers should remain seated.”

“Finally, the wrists must be inserted into the recesses on the padded hand-rests until the elbows rest on the pressure pads in the arms. Inside each recess is a sphere with indentations for each finger. Pulling back or pushing forward on this sphere adjusts the armrests.

“When all ten of these, and the two elbow pads, are triggered for all passengers, the light in the front of the carriage will change from Amber to Red, and the launch process will commence automatically, with a 30-second countdown. This time is needed to build up the immense pressure that will propel the vehicle like a bullet from an air rifle.

“To cushion the shock, the entire compartment rests ahead of a special gel that absorbs as much as half the impact, like falling onto a soft bed. The compartment will be forced back by the forces of launch until it locks into position. You will experience a vibration or shudder when that takes place; this is normal and nothing to be concerned about.

“When the light turns green, you will be traveling at more than fourteen times the Coahuila speed limit, and will cover a distance of 157 meters every second, or one kilometer every 6 1/3 seconds or so. At a little more than 5 kilometers distance from your destination, the light will begin to flash; ten seconds later, the capsule will begin to brake. This braking will be relatively gentle; friction will have already reduced your speed somewhat. Nevertheless, it will feel quite violent to anyone not used to it.

“Some passengers with a condition called Epilepsy may react badly to the rapid blinking of light through the windows; for that reason, they are tinted quite darkly at the base.

“Your journey today is to the industrial part of the city, some 15 km away. Arrival will be approximately 2 minutes 10 seconds after departure.”
(Pause for reply)

None of you have any particular problems following the instructions – the chairs (which look like luxury leather reclining chairs) won’t permit you to move on to the next operation until the current one is completed successfully. With the attendants to assist (and remind you of what to do, if necessary), it takes only a minute or so, most of which is pausing in the process while the attendants exit the capsule and the door and tube are sealed. A captive elemental then extracts all the air from the tube while the steam pressure builds. You briefly wonder if they use an elemental for that, too?

Some players have a problem with the GM dropping thoughts into their character’s heads like this. Mine know that they can freely ignore them, or can grab the ball and run with it, as suits them; these are basically present as conversation starters, opportunities for the characters to voice an opinion and then segue into anything their characters want to talk about. I provide a limited tolerance for side-chatter that isn’t game related – one brief joking reference or relevant anecdote, maximum – on the principle that if you don’t let players get such things out of their systems every now and then, they will crop up at more inconvenient times. Maybe half the time, no-one takes the bait, but every time I’ve neglected including such thought bubbles – either in-character or metagame in nature – my game hasn’t played as well as it does otherwise.

But I’m very careful to build from what is documented on the character sheet and any background provided by the player (and for this campaign, I required a written background). What’s more, inherited from the Hero System, these rules track the psychology of a character – extrapolation from those, with one eye to not impacting the playability and functionality of the character usually produces results which are both acceptable to the player and often shed new light on aspects of them that the player hadn’t considered.

There’s an important point of game philosophy involved in the back of this approach: To what extent do PCs belong exclusively to the players and to what extent is the GM a collaborator in their creation?

This process takes an approach that is very heavily-weighted toward the “collaborator” side of that equation; this does not dispute the player’s ownership, control of, or responsibility for, their character, it just means that the GM will help flesh it out from time to time and work to integrate it ever-more-tightly into the campaign world. Your players might have different ideas on the subject, and so might you as GM; but at least the issue is there for you to think about, now.

By the time the servants have exited the capsule after strapping you all in tight, the warning light turns red, warning that you are now 30 seconds from riding the fastest surface vehicle you’ve ever heard of! St B at top speed can travel faster, so can most jet aircraft, and almost all real spacecraft would leave this for dead – but none of those are strictly comparable. It should be one heck of an experience!

Suddenly, the weight of the world feels like it lands on you, quite literally. The air is forcible expelled from your lungs (except those of Basalt, who is strong enough – barely – to breathe normally at 160g’s).

Each PC then had to make a CON save to stay conscious, with modifiers for their physical capabilities. I had put together a customized unconsciousness calculator – a spreadsheet – that took each character’s stats and the results of their saving throw and translated the combination into a period of unconsciousness. I’d provide it for readers, but it’s so specific in its function that I doubt it would be of much use to anyone else. I also rolled in advance for the NPCs and integrated their results into the narrative – giving me a couple of ‘test subjects’ to make sure that the system worked..

Note that the cushioning gel slows the g-forces you experience massively – from 160g to a “mere” 64g – before anything else is taken into consideration.

For those awake for it, a quarter of a second after the biggest kick in the pants that any of you will ever experience – you hope – there’s a violent jerk, the equivalent of a punch to the jaw by a heavyweight boxer, as the capsule locks in place. One second later, strobing indicates that you have been propelled out of the palace at, presumably, 560-odd kph, and the green light shines to indicate that it’s safe to unstrap and loosen your restraints – but to stay in the seats.

Since none of you are epileptic, you suffer no ill effects from this. Zantar and Union Jack come to, the first just as the green light shines, the latter a couple of seconds later.

Everyone else woke up over the next few seconds.

You find that the joins between sections of pipe flash by so fast that they are barely noticeable, less than an eye-blink – a 40th of a second every quarter of a second. It’s impossible to see anything clearly that’s close to the track that guides you, but more distant features can be seen for long enough. Eight seconds after departure, the strobing effect stops as you exit downtown Monterrey. 14 seconds later, the suburban inner city gives way to a substantial wooded tract, which 4 seconds later becomes a large park.

It takes sixteen to traverse the park, which is clearly substantial in size, and perhaps created when the Pneumatic was first built and not yet established as ‘safe’. Beyond it, you find yourselves passing through leafy, well-maintained suburbs, as buildings become visible between the trees. It takes only twelve seconds to flash through several suburbs of similar nature and enter another wooded section. Four seconds after that, the green light begins to flash, warning that you will start decelerating in ten seconds. What the attendants didn’t tell you was how the capsule slows down.

It turns out to be a very simple device – the train passes over a sensor that begins to admit air into the cylinder. The shape of the aerodynamic nose has obviously been calculated to give precisely the right amount of slowing through friction to stop the capsule from it’s present speed (a little less than the initial 560-odd kph) in the close-to-frictionless tube to nothing, in exactly 5 km.

The braking force is about 2g’s, or more than 6 times the force of slamming on the brakes in a car traveling at high speed. This is obviously the reason people aren’t permitted to get out of their seats! Fourteen seconds later, the trees give way to more suburbs, but these have fewer trees and are far smaller and more run-down – more like what you saw in Leon. You have slowed enough that it takes almost half a minute before you notice that the landscape has become far more industrial in nature – more warehouses and obvious factories.

Forty seconds later, the capsule comes to a complete halt. You have traveled 15 km in 2 minutes and eight seconds, and now find yourselves in the Industrial suburb of Monterrey named Escobedo! No-one told you what to do next…

Timecheck: 9:33 AM, Friday, July 4, 1986 (Local Time)

The team then assisted in the loading of Steampunk-technology components manufactured by Escobedo Precision Manufacturing. There was more deliberately steampunk flavor in describing the factory and implying the manner of its’ operations. There was also interplay between co-workers of different races, emphasizing that all sorts of humanoids were now considered citizens of Coahuila. This might well be the most egalitarian society on Earth.

Part of this was a reaction to the blatant racism being displayed by the US President at the time of writing, and part of it was redressing all the implied criticism of the Mexican and Central American peoples reflected in the collapse of government post-Ragnarok.

The Clippership Peregrine turned out to be a sailing-ship of the skies. I had an illustration, but ran out of time before I could get too deeply into its operating principles; in hindsight, that was a good thing because it let me focus player attention on more important things – like the fundamental operating principles of most of the steampunk technology, which had been excerpted from the discussion of the Train (where it had been originally placed, and was irrelevant) to here (where it was about to become directly relevant).

Various roleplaying then took place, which are detailed in the next synopsis, so I’ll skip over them here.

Maynor began brooding as soon as the loading of the Cargo began, but when asked what the problem was, he replied only “I might be wrong. And you should pray to whatever gods will listen that I am.” This became the subject of some speculation before Specter demanded to know the mage’s concerns – just in case.

“I hope these components are not intended for the purposes I think they are intended for,” he replied. “You may have noticed that the Coahuilans use a unique combination of Victorian technology and Magic as the cornerstone of their industrial achievements. The standard models – and a few proven variations – of these devices are at the heart of that technology. These are mechanical devices that, like a mage, operate using Mana, effectively converting it into other forms of energy, using that energy, and then converting the waste back into turbulent Mana.

“The Generator Rings capture Mana and funnel it in an artificial Mana Stream to the Compressors, which focus several such streams into stronger ones. This is then used to power various mechanical devices, like the train that brought us to the capital, or the airborne ship that we currently ride.

“That’s a concept that has never sat well with me. If anything goes wrong, it risks leaving a region mana-dead, or mana-saturated. Neither is very appealing.

“Now, these were described as prototypes. Right away, that’s risky. On top of that, there are these ‘Exciters’ – I don’t know what they do, but the similarity of naming suggests boosting or supercharging the mana flow in some way, possibly using some of the Mana gathered to Energize the rest, effectively casting a spell on the Mana flow that’s powering the spell in order to amplify the mana received. It would be all too easy for that to get out of hand.”

All of which sounded suitably ominous, and redirected the party atmosphere that had prevailed into a state of high tension, exactly as intended.

Key Points & Notes

Once again, I’ve preempted just about everything by incorporating it into interjected annotations. But there are a couple of things to discuss.

I worked very hard at conceptualizing how the game physics of “magic” would integrate into a steampunk environment, because – as noted earlier – this seemed to be the logical outcome of a post-cataclysm Mexico infused with magic and non-human refugees. Certainly, there would have been some adjustment problems on the part of the imported population, but the cataclysm would have seriously decimated population levels, so ‘people’ who simply showed up and went about doing whatever they could for the survivors would have been like answers to a prayer.

Which brings me to another factor in deciding to have governments collapse (even disintegrate) in the wake of the disaster – the US had a significant industrial and technological capability to assist in recovery from the disaster if it were deployed properly, and would have received considerable assistance from beyond their borders, at least until the government blamed the United Nations and walked out on the rest of the world, politically. Mexico would not have possessed anything close to the same level of resources, and would have been quickly overwhelmed once communications networks went down and it became impossible to move by road – first because the world was roasted in 60-plus degree centigrade temperatures (more than enough to melt asphalt) and was then covered in a meter of snow a day for almost a month. Someone local would have had to take charge in order for people to survive, and therefore, everywhere were people had survived, someone had taken charge. As the snow melts (adding massive flooding to the problems), governments start putting themselves back together from the pieces – but expecting all those who took charge to simply give back the authority that they have acquired – it simply wasn’t going to happen.

The principle is therefore established that the more industrialized a nation is, the more it can retain its unity and emerge ‘relatively’ unscathed (nowhere was untouched), and the less industrialized, the more tribal the results would have been – but with people remembering how things used to be. You either suppress any trend towards ‘progress’ that might undermine your authority, or you find yourself another unifying force (religion in Leon and Veracruz, magically-driven technology in Coahuila), and then advance as fast as your unifying force permits. This mimics the evolution of society between the 16th and 19th centuries in many ways – and hence the pattern of the Kingdoms emerges.

There are a couple of points about Infodumps to emerge from the preceding – specifically, breaking them up whenever possible and finding a way to deliver information when it becomes relevant and not before. The more you can do this, the less your players will be overwhelmed and your game time chewed up. That’s not the only trick to it, of course – but it’s a solid start.

Finally, I’ve left the next synopsis intact, so that you can appreciate how strongly it has been compacted, compared to something approaching the original telling (above).

Synopsis, Session 13 (from Session 14)

The team, posing as Team Shadow, accompanied by their guide, “Diplomatic Escort”, and new-found ally, Maynor Morales of Demon House Aries, reached the capital of the Principality Of Coahuila, Monterrey.

They utilized one of the most exotic forms of transport that they have yet encountered to travel to the Presidential Palace, where they met various colorful characters, culminating in an audience with El Presidente Ramon daSilva himself.

The assemblage was then joined by a most unusual quartet who collectively made up “The Oracle”, capable of seeing past, present, and future. They had prophesied the team’s arrival, and that they would perform some Great Service for the Principality – if daSilva assisted them in completing their obligations quickly and heading north.

To that end, he made available his exclusive rapid-transit system through the city, the “Pneumatic”, and hired the fastest Airship in the Kingdom, the Clippership Peregrine, to carry you the rest of the way on the assignment that he was politically obligated to set before you.

That task: to collect various prototype components of some sort from the specialist manufacturer, the Escobedo Precision Manufacturing Works and convey them to a “Doctor Esperanza” at the Rosita Plasmic Laboratory and you would then be free to race to the border city of Neuvo Laredo in the Clippership, where vehicles “better suited to the sensibilities of Coahuila’s northern neighbors” would be waiting for them.

If all went according to plan (and it has, so far), this will shave something like 3 1/2 hours off the total trip to the USNA.

The parts loaded, the Clippership set off at enormous speeds for the town of Neuva Rosita, 250km away. The expected flight time was about 30 minutes. That means that you’re traveling at somewhere close to 500km/h – and acutely aware that sunlight heats ground (and hence the air above that ground) unevenly. While too gentle to be noticed at slower speeds, or in larger aircraft unless the turbulence is likewise super-sized, the Peregrine has been bucking and tossing like a cork descending a raging torrent. Throughout the trip, four things have been used as distractions:

1. You’ve all been astonished at how Green the province is. The use of magic has transformed a desert prairie into a breadbasket, with mile after mile of lush, productive, cropland. It looks the equal of Missouri, or of Southern England – but it’s not much smaller than Montana.

2. You’ve all taken a stab at trying to figure out what the cryptic names of the pieces of Cargo mean. The consensus is that a “Toric Generator Ring” is a piece of a power supply that gets arranged in a circle or Torus – hence the name. “Manic Exciter” and “Manic Compressor” have taken a bit more effort; the best you’ve been able to come up with is that the one supercharges a Mana Flow by somehow dumping extra power into it from somewhere, while the other squeezes a Mana Flow into a more coherent beam – a laser beam compared to a spotlight. But these guesses might be completely wide of the mark.

3. The one exception to this party game, Maynor has been brooding ever since you loaded the Cargo, but when asked what the problem was, he replied only “I might be wrong. And you should pray to whatever gods will listen that I am.” When the guessing-game of the cargo was set aside, this became the subject of speculation. But, after a while, the lack of any hint as to whether they were right or wrong put an end to this pastime.

4. So you all turned to musing on the advice that the Oracle gave each of you, and its meaning, interspersed with speculation about when the first Muffins would appear on St Barbara’s pillow.

Finally, Specter confronted Maynor directly. He reluctantly explained his misgivings about the technology of Coahuila in general, and the terminology used to describe these experimental components, which could – if the worst happened – leave an area either magic-dead or magic-saturated. Since a magic-dead zone was inherently inimical to life, while a magic-saturated environment turned passing whims and idle fancies into magical reality without restraint or consideration of consequences as well as spontaneously-manifesting magical effects of more random nature, this put rather a damper on the exuberant party atmosphere created by the imminent end of their Mexican Trip.

I went into more detail about the Rosita Plasmic Laboratory because it was to be the scene of considerable activity. Security took the form of robotic guard dogs which referred to themselves as Mechanicals. Most of the workers were also mechanical.

Dr Esperanza is a very small woman, standing 2 1/2 inches less than Nightshade, who is easily the shortest member of your group. When she speaks, her voice is punctuated by pops, crackles, and wheezes. “My, but you are a strong one”, she buzzes, looking at Basalt, before touching a control on her sleeve. Her forelegs begin ratcheting upwards, (cht-cht-cht-cht-cht), lengthening until she can look you in the eye. “Please, put those down over there,” she continues, pointing at an industrial trolley.

After the delivery was offloaded, she directed another mechanical assistant to replenish the Airship’s supply of “Catalyzing Aether”.

Technobabble, steampunk-style, necessary to transform the airship technology from extraordinary into accepted and routine – in this environment. Since a non-magical society would have no chance of replenishing this consumable, it also ‘confined’ the technology to this part of the world, minimizing potential disruption elsewhere.

Failure to confine technology that the GM makes available to the PCs is one of the most common mistakes that a GM can make. It doesn’t matter if it’s a magic wand or an engineering marvel, the consequences can completely destroy a campaign – I’ve seen it more than once.

The most memorable example that’s coming to mind right now is a +10 Sword Of Dragonslaying, introduced to solve a plot hole that the GM had written himself into. With that weapon, multiple dragons were slain by the wielder, and their hoards grabbed by the party, who became the wealthiest people in the world, and awash with magic weaponry. Which was when the campaign imploded.

Now, this is obviously an extreme example – but that only makes the flaw obvious, it doesn’t negate the principle: When in doubt, think about ways to restrict or localize an effect. Instead of a healing wand that makes the party nigh-invulnerable with the equivalent of infinite hit points wherever they go, give them a healing wand that was crafted for a specific mission and only works within a certain range of the evil tower it was intended to let the party target. Your players may grouse a bit, but you’ll still have a campaign afterwards for them to grouse in.

Anyway, I then went to some lengths to establish Dr Esperanza as a key NPC because (again) I saw potential for the character beyond this one adventure.

Noticing the PCs reacting to her demonstration of personal technology, she gave a semi-human but warm laugh. “My own silly fault,” she admits. “I was responsible for a mining facility that was experiencing difficulties staying on schedule, so I went out to take a look for myself, despite reports that the reason for the problems was instability of the mine walls and ceilings.

“Sure enough, there was more to the story – the vibrations from the mechanical diggers were destabilizing the rock. And that was when the ceiling of the mine-shaft gave way on top of me. The diggers, as per their programming, set aside their task and got me out, but my legs, pelvis, ribs, and one arm were crushed to a red smear.

“Fortunately, we have some skilled surgeons here in Coahuila, and a ready supply of replacement parts created by our ingenuity. Like most Automa-brids, as I grew accustomed to the replacements, I began to design custom requirements to suit my own needs, and hey presto! Here I am, the hybrid being you see before you!”

This was important, because those character traits were about to become critically important.

While waiting for the Clippership to be refueled, she showed off the facility (and again reflected Victorian social values – the civilized thing to do with any visitor was always to provide refreshments), giving the group the two-peso tour.

“We’re a fully-functional Plasmic Generating Facility, broadcasting power to a quarter of the Principality,” she explains. “Mana is collected from the environment and converted into a form of electrical fluid we call a Plasma because an appropriate gas – Neon, Argon – illuminates with a bright glow when the electrical fluid is present. The Plasma is then converted into a number of different forms – a Catalyzing Agent used to fuel airships, electricity for local consumption, and broadcast power waves for industrial applications.

“Some operations convert one or more of these forms of power back into Mana, supplemented by other forms of energy they may collect. We do that here ourselves, for example, to power the Mechanicals.”

“Correct me if I am misinterpreting, Doctor,” said Zantar, one eye firmly fixed on the two mages. “Are you telling us that you can convert electrical or mechanical energy, say from a waterwheel, into Mana by adding that power to an existing supply of Mana that you have pre-converted into a compatible form?”

“Yes, that’s exactly right, Mr Kzin. Of course, once it’s used as Mana, it is in a turbulent state and can no longer be used for practical purposes. At least, not until now – that’s where the components that you have delivered enter the picture”

Maynor’s frown deepened; he looked like someone attempting to cure biting into lemons by chewing on a grapefruit.

More infodump, originally written as notes on how the Clippership worked and relocated to a point of greater relevance.

Dr Esperanza explained that she had devised a way to coalesce a number of smaller turbulent Mana streams back into a single stable Flow, which could then be recirculated back into the Mana Converters. Of course, this required some refinements to the standard technology.

“By collecting and recirculating the Mana, since Mana is not consumed when it is used to create a magical effect, this device will revolutionize Coahuilan Industry. Power can be used and recirculated, to be used again, almost endlessly, in a closed loop. Only power consumed in other forms, and losses through inefficiencies in the conversion process, will need to be replaced.

“Effectively, that’s a million-fold increase in the capacity of a standard Plasmic Generator, maybe even a billion-fold! Imagine it – the one installation like this one able to supply the energy needs of the entire planet for the next millennia or more! If it works, we will be selling Mana-based technology all over the world as fast as we can manufacture it!

“Of course, that’s still some way off – all we have at the moment is a small prototype, itself a scaled-up version of a small proof-of-concept demonstration model. There are sure to be some bugs to be worked out before we can go to full industrial scale, and it may even be necessary to build a whole new facility to exploit the technology properly.”

Maynor looked even more upset. “Mana Flows are not the tame and regulated thing you imagine them to be, Dr Esperanza. Even if your prototype is only a ten-thousandth the effectiveness you hope to achieve, the results could be disastrous – have you considered the effect on your generator if one of the Mana Streams on which it depends were to abruptly increase in power 10-fold, 100-fold, 1000-fold? Yet that is precisely what you intend to do.

“If your safety precautions are inadequate, it could be cataclysmic for life on the entire planet!”

I wanted to place the PCs in the middle of two NPCs who were disagreeing with each other and both right from their own perspectives. Dr Esperanza, the eternal optimist, could only see the potential positives (and they were not insignificant); Maynor saw only the potential dangers if things went wrong. Between the two of them, they articulated the risk-vs-reward equation that summed up the existence of the facility and the work that was taking place there.

Unfortunately, Maynor’s lack of respect for Dr Esperanza, and her own sensitivity to the subject, painted them into opposing corners; a more diplomatic approach and offer of assistance might have yielded a different outcome.

This was not accidental on my part; I wanted the PCs to witness an approaching train-wreck but not be able to do anything about it until the inevitable derailment. This counterbalanced all the talk about how influential they had been in the Americas already and showed them that there were limits to how much they could change the world. This tension has been central to the campaign from game session #1, back in 1981.

But it was also important to show that despite his considerable diplomatic skills, Maynor still had his limitations and blind spots. I’d given the character considerable scope for showing off, it was important to keep him ‘human’.

Long story short, the test would go ahead. Esperanza was convinced that all reasonable precautions had been taken and preparations made for the worst-case foreseeable outcome.

And I had worked hard on those precautions; I wanted them to appear sufficiently adequate that a reasonable person might be convinced by the reassurances that they provided.

So incensed was Maynor that he over-spoke as the group re-boarded the airship –
“Smug, arrogant, over-optimistic blind fool, forgetting that all the progress she takes for granted was built on the lives of those who preceded her! Hubris and Myopia incarnate, as though a Mana Stream of that intensity would not have entirely distinct properties, like matter super-heated for the first time. It will all end in disaster. Immediately I return, I will notify the Council Of 13. We will put an end to this dangerous flirtation with disaster – if it is not too late by then.”

The full scope of his authority was thus revealed – in any matter that the locals acknowledged (willingly or forcibly) his capacity to speak for this “Council of 13”, his authority was absolute, no matter how politely expressed. Only if the locals resisted this acknowledgment was he forced to actually do more than make a status report to the command structure of House Aries – and, since he was a member of that ruling council, and a skilled politician and leader, he could usually be confident of their responses to any matter placed before them.

Union Jack was the only PC who was reassured by these developments; this acknowledgment of his true authority had made it clear that Maynor’s normal role was as Liaison to the Puppet Governments of Central America, and it was in that capacity that Muerte’s diplomatic outreach had arranged for him to be their guide. Hence, their mission was still secure.

Eight minutes later, you have reached cruising altitude and accelerated to full speed, already a third of the way to the border, still more than 100km away, when the air is suddenly filled with static charge. You all feel it crawling over your skin like ants. Electricity arcs between the ropes, and between the ship and the ground, and the ship and the balloon overhead.

Maynor yells, “Specter – the biggest Mana Curdle you can create, Immediately! You must protect your friends – I will have my hands full protecting the crew. Everyone, between us and the stern, and protect your eyes! Quickly! – we may have only seconds!!”

Specter, you can feel the Mana flows twisting and turning away from a point somewhere behind the vessel.

Union Jack and Zantar didn’t hesitate, but acted in completely different ways. Jack took up position directly between Specter and the rear of the ship, while Zantar erected an anti-magic force-field and started leaping and bounding all over the place, grabbing crew members who were a little slow to react and physically tossing them to the rear of the ship, including the loudly-protesting Captain Ferracorizon. Like a well-oiled machine, the other members also swung into action. In a trice, everyone was safely in position as Specter obeyed Maynor’s instructions, and an unbelievably bright light blossomed behind them Suddenly, you could hear a pin drop, as though someone had muted the roar of the wind whistling past the airship, and everyone had an acute down-elevator in the pit of their stomach as the ship started to drop like a stone.

Zantar yelled to Nightshade “Dark Force-field Shield us from that light!” – but she was already doing it.

Specter sensed every Mana Flow in the vicinity turn to flow toward the Laboratory.

The light faded after about 30 seconds. The ship was still dropping like a stone, and the ground looked a LOT closer than it had – Nightshade, as the most experienced flier, estimated that they had fallen 3,000 of the 5,000 meters in altitude that they had attained, roughly the height of the Pyrenees.

Looking back toward the town 40-odd km behind you, an enormous explosion has created a clearly-visible shock-wave and a multi-kilometer-wide mushroom cloud. As you watch, the explosion grows and reality seems to begin to fray at the edges.

Everyone then lost 10% of their hit points for no apparent reason, and all Recoveries went off-line for the time being – no healing, no recovery from exhaustion. This meant that the PCs would have to be very careful to make their efforts count. Several of them would also have recognized this as a sign that magic had been depleted in the vicinity, and for an unknown distance beyond. That 10% was only the beginning; everyone in range of the explosion was starting to die.

But Specter, as the mage of the party, could see that the disaster was even worse than that.

Specter, you realize that the explosion is something you’ve never seen before, an explosion of mana itself. The fireball will continue to grow, fed by the mana streams flowing into it, and attracting mana flows still unaffected as it grew large enough to do so. But it would also project upward as the earth orbited away from the explosion point, becoming a column of fire fueled by all the mana in the vicinity, maybe all the mana on the planet. But if all that mana was flung out into space, the resulting mana potential will be so extreme that no celestial mana will flow in to replace it, so the entire planet would become mana-barren. You are literally watching life die on earth – all life – unless something is done about it.

Key Points & Notes

In a roleplaying game, any prophecy of disaster comes true ninety-nine times out of 100. That’s because disasters challenge the PCs and make for interesting stories. And that one in 100 usually arises because the GM doesn’t want to be predictable.

But in this case, I had made it clear that the experiment was extremely dangerous. What neither the PCs nor Maynor had taken into account was Dr Esperanza’s psychology – she did not know what authority he could bring to bear, but knew from the arrangements that he at least had the ear of the President himself; it was entirely possible that he could have her experiments shut down completely, something that was intolerable to her. Too much of her self-esteem, and the single-mindedness that had permitted her rapid recovery from her injuries, were now bound up in her work. As soon as the airship departed, she rushed through the installation of the parts and threw the switches…

That’s illustrative of another important principle – if you want your NPCs to act in a certain way, design them so that behaving in any other way would be contrary to their nature. If they are already established, you may need to have them undergo experiences that modify their normal responses to what’s needed.

A GM can’t afford to get too attached to his NPCs. They are as rubber mice to a cat, or should be. Otherwise, he can find it difficult to be cruel enough to them when that’s what the plot needs.

Synopsis, Session 14 (from Session 15)

Last time, you delivered some experimental components to the Rosita Plasmic Laboratory and their head scientist, Dr Esperanza before departing aboard the “Clippership” Peregrine. Maynor, in particular, was a prophet of doom, intractably opposed to the very idea of what Esperanza was attempting. The rest of you had more open minds and found the concept a of Recombinant Manic Translator – effectively a near-perfect perpetual motion device based on Mana use and re-use – to be a fascinating one.

The laboratory was more than 40km behind you, eight minutes later, when a tremendous explosion broke reality at the seams as all the Mana in existence began to explode. All healing and recovery stopped, immediately.

Using tricks of the trade that Maynor had taught Specter earlier in the journey, the Mages were able to protect the travellers and crew of the Peregrine from the other effects of the Mana explosion and you immediately reversed course. Planetary Catastrophe trumps national emergency, or international politics, any day of the week.

As you sped back to the scene, hasty plans were laid to respond to the situation that your more-acute-than-human senses witnessed at the Laboratory and in the town.

What followed was a series of rescue operations and confrontations. Spectre, Zantar, and Maynor first overcame the Mechanical Guard Dogs, which had run amok, and the mages then began draining Mana from the Fireball until you could get close enough for Zantar to smash the critical components and end the major immediate threat. In the course of this operation, they found the body of Dr Esperanza half immersed in a wall that had flowed like water and then resolidified after encasing her. Only her mechanical legs remained visible.

Is that the end for the Redoubtable Dr Esperanza? We shall see…

In town, the rest of the rescue party were dealing with the side-effects of the explosion. Basalt confronted the marble column from the town Bank which had animated as a Stone Golem; Zeitgeist dealt with a steel creature that proved to be more feline than monstrous, but which could slice to ribbons with little more than a touch, and Nightshade grounded an opportunistic Lightning Elemental that had stumbled through the weakened dimensional boundary.

Those in town then turned their attention to more mundane rescue operations, freeing people trapped in collapsing buildings, a heart attack, manic winds, metal turning to sand – dangerous in cars travelling at speed and in building skeletons – and people who were partially buried beneath rock that had temporarily liquefied. These operations are straightforward but ongoing.

Meanwhile, the trio at the Laboratory were confronting a new problem – the frayed edges of reality that had been worn threadbare by the rushing cascade of Mana were not really rejoining the way you would have hoped.

I often pose problems that the PCs have to find a way to solve. I make sure that there’s always at least one viable solution, but don’t force it on the players; if they come up with a satisfactory solution of their own, so be it. If there are potential problems that they aren’t taking into consideration, I may drop a hint or two if there’s someone who can see the possible complication. I will always answer any question their character is in a position to know the answer to, and if there isn’t someone in such a position, will guide the PCs in finding an answer to the question, or discovering that it would take too long to resolve that particular question. But final decisions are always the players.

In this case, I had a solution prepared if the players needed it, and suitable prompts, but the PCs managed to find their way to my solution on their own. It involved the spell that the Rheezok had used to draw everyone into a mutual dream-state to facilitate communications between the species….

Using that spell as a Mana Tag, Spectre could summon the Rheezok negotiator who went by the name “Eldar”. Nightshade could then invoke the mutual defense agreement between the two groups, and that would enable them to put his planned solution into practice.

The Rheezok guided Spectre in how to construct a self-perpetuating spell that would siphon Mana from the natural flow in the uninjured regions and use it to knit reality back together faster than it could be damaged, then recreate the spell with the healthy mana flow that resulted, bootstapping itself until all the damage was repaired. Because this did not attempt to affect the mana of the entire planet directly, it was possible to construct a spell that no mage could possibly cast – and cast it.

They then returned to the town and joined in the rescue operations. Help finally arrived, led by President daSilva himself. Nightshade observed that he had enough sense not to try and “take charge” – instead, he describes priorities to his rescue unit commanders, listens to their advice and comments, makes decisions, and sets about knocking down any bureaucratic road-blocks. Whatever is needed, in equipment or supplies, for example, is immediately en-route – he is able to micromanage to such an extent that he is revising the travelling sequence of the convoys of supplies despatched in advance, on the fly, without recourse to written notes, and to give each a specific street address at which they are to stop and unload.

Maynor greeted the President and then took decisive action after apologizing for the confusion that he was about to create.” With that, he created a magic circle around the entire group of travellers and cast a spell on it, which Spectre was able to identify as a two-way illusion – inside, they saw an illusion of the world outside the magic circle, while to those outside it, both they and the circle had vanished.

“I did not want him to ask too many questions. For one thing, my answers might be impolitic, and for another, we have a decision or two to make that require privacy. We may have one last rescue to mount, en route to resuming our mission.

“I can’t see President daSilva abandoning research into Recombinant Mana Power Generation, despite this disaster. He would be too politically compromised if he did so, as he intimated back at the Palace.

“Spectre, Nightshade, would you agree that since any other engineer is likely to be less competant, the security of the planet would be enhanced with Dr Esperanza still in charge of that research? She at least had some inkling of the concept of safety measures and precautions – no matter how inadequate her preparations were – and seemed able to learn from experience.”

There was general agreement. “Well, unfortunately, she did not survive the disaster, but I don’t see why we should let that stop us. We have one opportunity yet to save her, and it all rests on giving you the opportunity to complete your own mission successfully.”

And with that glimmer of hope in the face of disaster, this article comes to an end. There was more to the actual game session, as the PCs came up with a plan, led by Maynor, but that will be dealt with in the third and – for now – final part of this series.

That’s because there was an important coda to the disaster, involving the theory of time travel and some wrinkles that the players hadn’t considered before, but that were implicit in the campaign physics that was already well-established.

Even though that coda took place as part of the 14th game session (the one detailed above, in other words), it is far more tightly bound to the campaign content that followed, part of the segue from Phase Two to Phase Three of the sub-campaign.

So, for that reason, I’ve decided that this is the right break-point to separate part two from part three of this series.

I’m nowhere near as finished on part 3 as I was when I started this part, so it might take longer than a couple of weeks for the last part to happen. Next week, another “short” article not connected to this one.

Today I’m going to attempt to make the world’s most boring subject – How I Manage My Money – sexy.

No, that’s going too far. I’ll settle for interesting.

That might be asking too much, too – but there is RPG Relevance to the subject. The goal will be to not make it boring, and not to be too self-centered. Those are going to be hard enough to make this a challenging subject, so apologies in advance if I stumble in either regard!

With more than thirty subtopics listed to cover in the planned article, I don’t have the time to bog down too much along the way (I hope). Instead, each should be short and sharp. But there’s still a lot to get through!

NB: I’ve used the Australian ‘cheque’ and not the spell-checker-suggested American ‘check’ because the latter means something else here and I wasn’t confident that it was correct usage.

Background, Briefly

When I first moved to Sydney to attend university, I was on a government scholarship. This meant that once a month I got a cheque which I had to deposit; when the cheque cleared, I had cash. And that was all the money that I had for the entire month.

Those conditions force you to get good at budgeting, with an emphasis on keeping it practical. I quickly learned to divide my money into several envelopes – one for fares (I bought a weekly ticket because it was cheaper), one for routine expenses, one for ‘other’ expenses (travel, birthdays, and Christmas mostly), and one each for each week’s spending money. Finally, there was an “emergency reserve” envelope.

I started by taking out the money needed for fares and routine expenses and filling the relevant envelopes with what I thought I would need. That left 6-7 more (depending on how many Wednesdays were in the month, because the first Wednesday of the month was ‘pay-day’). So I divided whatever was left, as equally as possible, amongst those envelopes.

The secret to the system was when money came out of those envelopes. On Sunday night, I put that week’s ‘spending’ into my wallet, including what I needed to spend on tickets the next morning to cover the forthcoming week. Gifts had a fixed budget of $10 each, or less – if I had a birthday or had to do Xmas shopping, the appropriate amount also went into the wallet, with a list of who I still had to buy for (if one was needed – yes for Xmas, usually not for birthdays). One quarter-share of the original ‘routine expenses’ amount also went into the wallet.

That left only the “emergency reserve” – sometimes, there was a delay in processing the cheque (once, it got lost in the mail, for example). That was a cushion against needing to stretch my money an extra week, in ‘bare-bones batten-down-the-hatches’ style). It was also used from time to time for unexpected out-of-pocket expenses, like when I needed to buy a backpack or new pair of shoes. Whatever was left in that envelope at the end of the month became available for ‘luxury’ purchases over the course of the next month. It didn’t matter if I blew the lot on one purchase, or doled it out a little at a time on a number of smaller purchases; it was ‘extra money’ because the routine expenses were all covered already.

That system was the one takeaway from my university days that lasted, outside of RPGs and some friendships that abide to this day. When I went to work in a bank the year after, I employed a variation on the scheme to essentially divide my money up into ‘regular expenses’, ‘routine spending’, and.’emergency reserves’.

Background, Too: Bookkeeping

Much later, after my job as a systems analyst / programmer was outsourced, I started a second career strand as a bookkeeper. Many of the jobs that I undertook in this area were ‘odd fringes’ of the profession – forensic recreating of accounts in which some of the invoices were lost, some had gone unpaid, and some of the cheque stubs used to pay the invoices had been left blank, for example. Financial jigsaw puzzles that were each incomplete, but which generally told a complete picture when the overlapping parts were overlaid.

These puzzles required logic, system, and detective work to reconstruct – an invoice or account statement might list the previous invoice amount and show a payment of a certain amount on that invoice, which might be the only indication of the amount of the previous invoice (it had gone missing, and the cheque stub that matched the payment shown was blank; a bank statement told me the amount and the date the cheque had been presented). Only about three times was it necessary to pay to get a photocopy of the actual cheque from the bank, even though there were more than five years of such holes to reconstruct.

But this taught me to view money as a single ‘well’ from which pre-budgeted amounts could be drawn on a schedule, instead of dismembering the cash in advance. It made my envelopes ‘virtual’, in other words – just numbers on a page, and enabled me to transition from a physical currency to an electronic one (years later, when I went to work for an employer who paid cash-in-an-envelope, I was surprised at how archaic it felt).

And that, to a large extent, is how my budgeting process still works – money coming in is divided into various virtual envelopes. These days I use a spreadsheet, which allows me to project budgets years in advance, because domino effects mean that today’s decisions can impact budgets years from now, but the principles are the same.

Two Budgets

I maintain two versions of the spreadsheet in question – one labeled “Pessimistic” and one, “Optimistic”. Both labels are misnomers, as you’ll see before the article is complete. I always base my expenditures on the “Pessimistic” version, because it provides a reasonable ‘worst-case’ forecast, but base my budgetary decisions on both in combination.

Military planners and Intelligence analysts use the same principle – multiple projections are extrapolated from what is known or strongly believed, with different underlying assumptions making the difference between the two.

I apply the same principle to other aspects of life, too, especially to RPGs in various ways.

Reality usually falls somewhere in between the two – but by budgeting based on the “Pessimistic” forecasts, I can live with reasonable certainty that the essentials are covered.

The Big Three Expenses

My big three expenses are – in order from biggest to smallest – Rent, Food, and Electricity.

Rent is a fortnightly deduction, taken directly from my Bank Account.

Food is a discretionary purchase made through my credit card (which gives me the ability to exceed the budgeted amount if necessary or desirable).

Electricity represents (in winter) the biggest single-invoice item, a quarterly expense that rises dramatically in Winter and falls in Summer. The winter bills are far in excess of available funds from any given payment of income – I have to save up to pay for them for weeks or months in advance.

Assorted Other Expenses

On top of the big three, there are various other expenses that occur either regularly or as discretionary expenditures. My budget attempts to forecast when those will occur to a reasonable statistical certainty.

These include telecommunications, health care (especially pharmaceuticals), stationary, media, subscriptions, takeaway food, Christmas & gifts, paying down my credit card debt, Campaign Mastery, and the occasional luxury.

Focus: Income

I assume that I will make no money from Campaign Mastery – even though I do, every now and then. I also assume no income from sales of Assassin’s Amulet, even though those also occur from time to time.

My primary source of income is a government disability pension, and the first difference in assumptions can be found here. In theory, this goes up twice a year by the amount of the six-monthly inflation percentage (unfortunately, many of my expenses are not so indexed, or life would be a lot simpler).

Until the Pandemic, inflation in Australia was running between 3.4% and 4.3% per annum. During the pandemic, that inflation rate plummeted, but in an election-sweetener, the government payed a 6-monthly increase of 1.9% anyway (which works out to an annual rate of about 3.84%). My optimistic forecasts assume that my income will continue to rise by 1.9% every 6 months. My pessimistic forecasts drop this to 1.7% – which makes a big difference as they accumulate.

$500 (a nice round number), increasing 1.9% every 6 months for 4 years, becomes a projected income of $581.25. At the lower rate, it’s just $572.18 – a difference of more than $9 a week, or more than $235 over the course of a six-monthly cycle. If that discrepancy is maintained over the full four years, the accumulated difference in budgetary bottom-line is almost $1900.

The reality is that most six-monthly increases will be greater than the forecasts, but some may be smaller. But if they are larger, it probably means that expenses have risen by as much, if not more, than this percentage – so using the smaller amount as my budgetary basis actually allows for that.

Focus: Rent

My rent is just shy of $300 a week. Before getting the disability pension, my rent was actually more than my weekly income by a whisker – which meant that I was completely dependent on what outside income I could scrape together

My optimistic budget forecasts that this will increase by $5 every year. My pessimistic budget assumes a 4% increase every year, rounded up to the nearest dollar, or about $12 a year.

The reality is that there are a lot of rental properties available in my area, at the same rate or less, which acts to suppress rent increases. I’ve been at this address for more than 10 years, and had only two increases – of about $10 each, from memory – in that time. I’m probably due for another one, or would be (if not for the Pandemic), which has stifled the purchasing of new rental accommodation as an income generator, which is one of the primary causes of rental rises. But the budget prepares me for an increase, when it comes, and releases money back into my ‘pot’ of available cash each time one doesn’t eventuate. And that’s true of both budget versions.

Focus: Electricity

A while back, when electricity prices were ‘out of control’ (according to the government), they were rising at about 4.1% a year – against and inflation rate of mid three-point-something. Government pressure, and policy changes, and the increasing level of renewables in the energy ‘mix’, have reduced prices steadily, to a net increase of two or three percent.

Nevertheless, my pessimistic budget assumes that 4.1% per-annum increases over the previous year’s bill will start with the next bill due. My optimistic budget assigns a smaller increase of about 2.5%.

Both of these are pessimistic. The real rate, down from the high point, is about 1.5%. What’s more, these increases compound year-on-year, so the gap between projected invoiced amount and likely reality keeps getting bigger and bigger – to about $2000 a year in 4-5 years.

Each time an actual bill comes in, that gets fed into a table within the spreadsheet, updating the estimated invoices for the entirety of the predicted timetable. It also calculates the difference between the forecast amount and the actual; if there’s a trend of that getting smaller or larger, it means the increase percentages need revision.

On top of all that, one year is not like the next, weather-wise; a late winter can have a massive effect on the electrical bills, or an early one. To allow for that, the pessimistic budget adds $200 to the projected amount of each invoice and then credits it back the following fortnight, while the ‘Optimistic’ budget allows $100 and then credits it back. This makes sure that I have the funds on hand to pay any reasonable electric bill by the due date (because there is a penalty for late payment, or more specifically, a discount for early payment that has been factored into the estimates).

The net result, since I budget to the pessimistic budget, is that I get between $50 and $200 back into my pocket on top of the credit amounts, every quarter. The further into the future I project the budget, the greater these amounts become. By the time the projected invoices hit about $1200, the resulting ‘extra in my pocket’ is likely to be $300-$400.

I’ve tried many simpler approaches, only to be caught short when an unexpectedly high bill comes in. So both budgets are conservative to the point of pessimism in this area, only varying in the degree of pessimism.

Focus: Groceries

I buy groceries in 4-5 week lots, because the supermarket that I use gives free or almost-free deliveries above $300. On top of that, I will use my discretion (and what I feel like) along the way to ‘pad’ the groceries stored. I’ve found that longer periods mean that food has gone off before I consume it (I hate throwing money away) and anything less adds expense and inconvenience.

Despite all this, to keep the budget more-or-less balanced, the pessimistic model only allows for $260 a ‘grocery shop’ – so I routinely go over-budget, but make money back by not needing to do another one for a week or more longer than forecast. If I can squeeze an extra week out of four successive grocery shops, that’s a whole grocery shop that I haven’t had to make – so I have spent about $200 over budget to save $260, putting an extra $60 into my pocket.

The optimistic model is more generous in allowing for more grocery shopping, stealing back about $2600 a year from the money saved.

This is one area of the budget that is changing rapidly; my grocery bills have been going up as the supermarkets shift from being cheaper than the competition to being ‘greener’ than the competition. That makes it easier to get to the $300 target but harder to stretch the resulting food. Enter a new supermarket (almost) right across the road from me – a little more expensive, but a lot more convenient for perishables and day-to-day needs.

This means that I can focus on buying such commodities from them most of the time, permitting me to space primary shopping further apart and stocking up more on things that will last. So this budget area is evolving in response. If I can spend $120 to squeeze an extra two weeks out of each major grocery shop, I will bring the grocery budget back to where it was before the stores changed policy. So far, I’m not quite managing that, but I’m getting close to it.

Bottom line: I shop when I need more. I can probably survive for a month without buying more of anything if I have to. It might not be the most comfortable or indulgent month, but it wouldn’t be intolerable.

Focus: Telecommunications

My biggest expense in this area is phone and internet, which cost me roughly the same amount every month. But the pandemic has forced me to get a smart phone, and data charges mean that it’s costing me about $35 every three months on top of that fixed monthly amount. This isn’t currently in my budget, something that I have to rectify at my next opportunity.

While these costs will undoubtedly rise over time – all expenses do – neither version of the budget assumes that they will; instead, they assume that the budget will get redone when there’s such an increase.

Focus: Health Care

My primary health care cost is pharmaceuticals. I keep track of how long each packet or bottle of each should last, how much they should cost, and use that to get a fairly accurate total of my health-care costs.

The most expensive medication is about $86 every four months or so. But some of these purchases are subsidized by the government so that they only cost $5.60. I assume that all but one of the annual purchases will be at the full price, but the reality is that half (sometimes 3 of the 4) are subsidized, returning $80 to $160 to my pocket annually.

Both pessimistic and optimistic budgets use the same numbers in this area.

Complication: Two more Budgets

There are other costs that are greatly reduced as a result of that medication. Which means that prudence demands that I make allowance for it going away, or ceasing to work, without notice.

This changes the frequency of a recurring purchase from twice every 5 weeks to every 2 weeks. It won’t happen overnight – there will be a slow progression from one to the other – but I maintain two variants on the budget (one ‘pessimistic’ and one ‘optimistic’) which assume something close to this worst-case scenario.

Adding to that, the price of these expenditures is being artificially inflated every quarter by the government. So there is a disproportionate impact to the sudden loss of this pharmaceutical weapon, of up to $4000 a year.

I don’t use these budgets at all, except to plan my response to the headline change in assumptions. Suffice it to say that my quality of life would take a massive hit, and that damage would worsen with time.

Focus: Reserves

I deliberately budget to keep $100 reserve in my bank account at any given time, and $100 in my pocket. These ‘cushions’ mean that I can go about my life without worrying over every penny spent, but also keeps the amount of damage that I can do to the budget with impulse purchases to a reasonable level.

There have been times when I have experimented with increasing or decreasing these reserves, but both acts seem to result in budget instability for different reasons. Right now, this is a ‘sweet spot” that helps me cope with the unpredictability of life.

The reserves stay the same in both versions of the budget.

Focus: Stationery, Subscriptions, Takeaway Food

Every now and then, I have to buy stationery for various reasons. I budget about $65 for this every 12 weeks or so. The reality is that it costs a little less sometimes (but earlier than predicted) or it costs a bit more (but less frequently). Over the course of a year, the average would be statistically fairly accurate, but in the shorter term this is a wild-card element within the budget that is only marginally tamed.

Every couple of years, I have to pay half of a subscription that I share with a friend of mine. This hasn’t changed in quantity very often and is reliable in the time sense. This year, we were able to take advantage of a special offer to renew early, saving money in the long run. If that happens regularly, the budget will need revision.

When gaming happens at my place (which happens regularly these days), I will frequently get takeaway food at the same time that the players do. This is an indulgence. I bake it into my budget every fortnight, but the actual amounts spent are usually less than forecast. Balancing that, any takeaway treats that I pick up during the week also come out of this budget – which, in turn, helps stretch the interval between grocery deliveries.

All these tend to be very similar between both versions of the budget.

Focus: Christmas & Gifts

I do a lot of shopping for gifts online through my credit card. I sometimes do a lot of it in-store in cash.

I accommodate this by adding the Xmas Budget to my ‘cash in reserve’. If I buy something with cash, it comes out of the $100 reserve ‘in pocket’ which is then replenished with a withdrawal from the bank. If I buy something with the credit card, I transfer money from the reserve to the card. Either way, the amount in reserve gets dropped as purchasing proceeds.

If I spot a gift during the year, I buy it and reduce the amount to be officially set aside later in the year. I also allow myself a Christmas budget to buy a gift for myself, and some extra food, and a birthday gift for myself as well.

The amounts set aside for both these are different in the Pessimistic and Optimistic budgets – Optimism means that I have more money to spend, so this spends more of it, by a few hundred dollars Australian. I have a well-earned reputation for being a canny shopper in this area – and of always buying for the person receiving the gift (easier with some than others). I also often shop ‘to budget’ – allowing so much for each individual (not necessarily the same amount – couples get allocated as ‘1-and-½ people’ instead of two, for example. But these are used as guidelines and strong recommendations – if I spot something that looks perfect, I’ll buy it if it’s anywhere close to the budgeted amount.

Focus: Credit Pay-down

I freely admit that I use my credit card to absorb budgetary bumps along the way. But almost all my discretionary budget goes into paying down my debt because otherwise, interest eats my budget alive. But I’m neither a monk nor a saint; the temptation to indulge myself is ever-present. There are times when it, quite honestly, gets the better of me. It’s to fight those pangs off that I budget for those indulgences mentioned in the previous section. It doesn’t always work, but it helps.

Every version of my budget is aimed at first, paying off the credit card debt, and then keeping it controlled thereafter while that discretionary budget becomes savings, into which I can dip as necessary.

The date at which the card is paid off varies, and sometimes (to cover an electrical bill AND a grocery shop) I have to let the debt grow again for a little while.

Focus: Campaign Mastery

Campaign Mastery doesn’t cost very much to maintain – it’s about A$210 every couple of years. I maintain a separate bank account for it, with a cash reserve. When an expense comes in, I dip into that reserve and then rebuild it a little at a time as necessary – which is the same way that I built up the reserve in the first place.

Any money that I make from Campaign Mastery first contributes to that reserve, and second, adds to my spending on discretionary indulgences. Usually, I split such income 50-50, but if there’s been a big hit to the reserves recently, they may get more of the bonus..

Guideline, not straitjacket

I generally consider my budget to be a guideline, not a restriction. If the credit card is getting out of hand, in interpret the budget in a more restrictive way for a while, though, or if there’s a big unexpected expense (those two often go hand in hand)..

Most of the time, if I really want something, I can buy it – but if I do so, it’s borrowing disposable income from the future (specifically, from a time when the credit card is paid off). So I don’t do so completely casually; in fact, a lot of my budgetary process is aimed at permitting a certain level of indulgence while keeping the finances under control. My reserves are there to be used as necessary.

Straitjacket, not Guideline

All that changes when big bills ore other expenditures are on the horizon. I grow less indulgent approaching and during Winter, for example, and at the tail end of Winter, Christmas Shopping starts. The absolute bottom line is that I always need to have enough money on hand to pay the important bills – rent, electricity, groceries, telecommunications, transport (which I didn’t mention earlier), and to include a minimum Christmas spend in that total. Once those are covered, I can afford to be relatively casual about the rest.

A Dynamic Process

It’s important to observe that my Budget is a dynamic process, not a fixed set of numbers. I revise it every fortnight and whenever a significant quantity changes – income varies every six months, for example, and utility bills arrive quarterly (usually later than the date estimated in the budget, which only defers the credit repayment).

I always revise the forecast numbers to the actual as soon as they become known. That means that the budget can be viewed as a model simulating what my finances will look like at a future point in time if I behave in a certain way.

In fact, the reason I don’t project more than 4 years into the future is that beyond that point, the increase in utility bills become budget-breakers, something not likely to happen in real life – so the budget becomes an unreliable guide. Originally, I only projected two years into the future – that was when the electrical bills were rising rapidly – then I extrapolated that to be ‘whenever the credit card was paid off’, which at one point last year was 2025 under some pessimistic assumptions. That was when I realized that it was giving me false guidance, and began cutting back the forecast period.

Complications: Book-buying

I’ve almost finished describing it before moving onto some analysis and then making all of this relevant.

One complication is that I have a friend who uses me to buy books for him, since he doesn’t have a credit card. So he occasionally gives me money, which gets spent as though it were my own, and the books then become gifts. I make no money from acting as a go-between, but some of the books become resources used for RPGs. That includes the occasional Kickstarter that we back.

Until it gets spent, this becomes money in my account that I treat as not belonging to me; I logically partition it off. On top of that, I track how much it will buy in both Australian dollars and US dollars (approximately), given various fees and shipping charges.

We haven’t done anywhere near as much of this as we used to, due to changes in Amazon’s policies – that’s their loss.

The Pessimism in Optimism

It’s clear that there’s an element of Pessimism in the ‘Optimistic’ budget – it aims to strike a realistic balance between what is likely to happen and what might happen. Because it is the actual working instrument, the one that determines what can be spent and when, and what has to be accumulated toward a future invoice, it can’t be blindly optimistic, or even completely ‘realistic’; it has to prepare for the possibility that things will be worse than either of those.

The Optimism in Pessimism

Nor is the ‘Pessimistic’ budget a description of the worst-possible case; Electricity and Rent don’t increase by 5% a year, for example. That’s because the worst possible case is completely unmanageable, and so improbable that it becomes misleading. Instead, it compromises its pessimism with what it realistically the worst-case scenario that is likely to apply.

I’m always refining these models to make them more useful. Until earlier this year, for example, the pessimistic model assumed that there was no increase in income levels, but that became increasing unrealistic – to the point where it was of no value as a planning tool, and that is it’s primary purpose.

Do Good GMs Budget Better?

Well, a budget means being able to abstract and simulate; it means understanding the differences between realism, optimism, and pessimism, and how to use all three to moderate and control expenditure; it means being able to cope with deadlines and logical structures, being able to recognize patterns and use them as indicative predictors of the future.

All of those are either useful abilities or attributes that contribute to the success of a GM. They may not be the totality of requirements for the role, but they are a good start, especially if you throw in a little imagination. Certainly, to be a good GM you should have all those qualities in some measure.

So I would argue that the answer to this question is yes, absolutely – if they have learned how to apply their GMing skills to the budgetary process..

Money In The Abstract

Right away, then, there’s an obvious point of relevance – but actually, it’s more like a Window; a connection to a range of points of relevance applying the principles of my budgetary process in various ways.

First, though, you need to make the logical leap to thinking of money in the abstract. Once you’ve done that, it becomes a manipulable commodity, and you can use the same tools and principles used to handle monetary budgets to handling anything else that can be treated in the abstract.

And that’s the window to relevance.

The Principles

Before I go there, though, it’s probably worth the effort to expound the basic principles that I’m talking about:

• Be systematic
• Be logical
• Be organized
• Be analytic
• Know how to abstract
• Know how to use the abstract to simulate imperfectly
• Use all of the above to make and revise plans
• Ensure the essentials are covered first
• Don’t assume you won’t indulge; build controls to limit your indulgence to reasonable levels
• Use realism to moderate extremes
• Use plans as guidelines when not under pressure and rules when you are
• Always plan to deadline

Let’s look at how those principles can be applied to six points of real relevance (there are almost certainly more).

Relevance: Time Is Money is Time

How do you spend your time? The question itself is evidence that time and money can be considered interchangeable, at least in an abstract sense. And that means that all the principles of my budget can be applied.

• Be systematic — generalize your time expenditures, at least initially, to make sure that you are being comprehensive and not leaving out anything important. Then break those general categories down into more specific time expenditures. Keep an eye on both the average and the variation relative to that average to, say, the 85% mark – that is to say, 85% of the time it will be ‘this amount of time or less’. Allow 10% on top the average, and you have your pessimistic and optimistic time budgets, respectively.
• Be logical — Some activities can operate concurrently, others have to be given your full attention, and some are somewhere in between. For example, I try to always get half an hour of TV-watching done while eating breakfast, and at least half-an-hour more while eating dinner. If I have 3 hours a day budgeted for that purpose, and meet half of that budget in this way, I then have a choice of what to do with that scheduled hour-and-a-half – I can either use it to get the TV watching up to 4½ hours a day, or expend it on doing something else, or something in between. It becomes a budgetary reserve that can be deployed as needed.
• Be organized — You can’t budget time without some means of tracking what the time is and when you start and finish certain activities. Or, as Mythbusters put it, “writing it down is the difference between science and two guys fart-arsing around”. The simplest answer is a timepiece of some kind and a notepad and maybe a spreadsheet for analysis. The most complicated is time-tracking software. Choose the technique that is least inconvenient for you. But there are looser techniques – I often use the ‘CD timekeeper’ – I play a CD while involved in some task on the computer, like writing these articles, and take the entirety of the last track ‘off’ to rest my eyes. The average 10-track CD is about 35-40 minutes long, a 20-track CD is about 72 minutes (the one currently playing is 73 minutes 18 seconds long, and is one of the longest in my collection). Taking the last track off means that I’m paying attention to the CD ending and putting a new one into the machine, restarting the clock – otherwise, I tend to just hit the mute button and discover that hours have passed when I next think about putting another disc into the player, breaking my ‘clock’ and making myself more tired than I should be.
• Be analytic — This is something that a spreadsheet forces you to do. But you could manage it with a cheap set of ledgers in which you track time spent on different tasks instead of financial expenditures. Totals and averages matter, as do notes on the circumstances, and the ability to generalize and abstract those notes into theoretical cause-and-effect models. For example, I know that if I concentrate my game prep to the day before I game, I will get more done because of the level of focus involved than I would have had that time been broken up and allocated to other days of the week – but it leaves the time-budget vulnerable to chaos and misjudgments of economy and how long things will take, and almost certainly means that I will get 5 hours of sleep the night before play. Maybe less. That problem goes away if I’ve at least made a start on each major task before the-night-before rolls around because I’ve tested the theoretical assumptions about how long tasks will actually take while I have time to do something about under-estimates. Which means I get jumped by surprise less often when the big push comes. What I lose in efficiency, I more than gain through tighter scheduling.
• Know how to abstract — I’ve more or less covered this already, so instead I’ll discuss another aspect of being systematic, and that’s an awareness of the length and frequency of different cycles of activity. This is especially true when it comes to irregular time expenditures – things that don’t crop up very often or predictably, but that have a significant impact when they do happen. If I have to visit the doctor’s surgery (happens every 3-6 months), I can basically write off that entire afternoon or morning. If I were doing a time budget, I would allow for a ‘lost afternoon’ three months after each such appointment – and if it doesn’t happen then, I would bring forward other activities scheduled for the following week, effectively rolling the ‘lost time’ forward until reality catches up with it.
• Know how to use the abstract to simulate imperfectly — A week, when planned in advance, is essentially a rough simulation of how the week’s time will get expended, at least in theory. We’ve all used simple schedulers to track our classes – “Next period is English” – when we were in school. That’s all the foundation you need to be able to do it for your own purposes, and Master time, instead of letting it master you.
• Use all of the above to make and revise plans — Those plans might be as simple as a list of things that need to be done, in priority order, with an estimate of how long each will take to complete. You spend your week crossing items off the list. If you break each task down to achievement to a minimum standard, a better standard, and a high-quality standard, and budget your time and priorities accordingly, you end up with the system that I described in Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity and refined in To Every Creator, An Optimum Budget?.
• Ensure the essentials are covered first — That system has, at it’s heart, the principle of ensuring that the essentials are covered to a bare minimum acceptable standard before any time is invested in anything else. But we aren’t necessarily talking about game prep (yet) – essentials are things like chores, eating, bathing, and paid work, including travel time to and from. The fact that you can treat the net total of Game Prep as a block of activity and then apply the same principles and techniques to break that block activity down into general tasks shows the strength of the approach.
• Don’t assume you won’t indulge; build controls to limit your indulgence to reasonable levels — What’s ‘indulge’ in this context? Is it watching excessive TV? Or playing video games? or both? That’s up to the individual – I would argue that it’s anything that’s not productive in any way other than personal entertainment. The key is that by allowing for some time lost to that activity, you keep the system sustainable.
• Use realism to moderate extremes — You can’t assume that the world will be perfect. Neither can you assume that everything will have the worst possible circumstances – the maximum possible time requirement. You need to temper your forecasts and planning with a sensible dose of realism. A good trick is to assume that most things will take their average time, and then throw in an allowance for ‘whatever takes longer’. This essentially says ‘some things will take longer than forecast, but not all of them, and some will even be completed to a sufficient standard ahead of schedule, freeing up time for other purposes’ – which is realistic; the difference between optimism and pessimism then becomes a function of what the averages that you use are, and how large an allowance you make for ‘excess time’.
• Use plans as guidelines when not under pressure and rules when you are — Real life always throws up unexpected opportunities as well as complications. Knowing when time is a straitjacket and when its advice that can be disregarded in order to take advantage of an opportunity to take up one of those unexpected opportunities is a critical judgment skill. Knowing what it means in terms of practical differences, and how to compromise, only adds to your Time Management -Fu.
• Always plan to deadline — Knowing WHEN you need something is as important as knowing that you need it. Everything should have a deadline attached to it, if not several. I have deadlines for when I should have started doing something in order to have confidence that it can be finished in time, and deadlines for doing it to a minimum satisfactory standard which leaves time to refine it if necessary, and deadlines for deciding if that minimum standard will be good enough. Deadlines are one of your primary planning tools – in budgeting time as well as money.

  For example, as I write this, it’s just gone 10:51 PM – and 11 PM is my deadline for final revision and uploading of an article if it’s to be assured of being published on deadline (midnight, my local time). I can take up to an extra hour – but anything more means that I’ve missed my self-imposed deadline. Which means that it’s time to consider abbreviating the final sections of this article.

Relevance: RPG Prep

Of course, as implied a number of times in the preceding section, any advice that applies to general time management is also applicable to RPG Prep activities. So similar would the entries of any detailed analysis under this heading be (to those that were presented in the previous section), that such a breakdown would be largely redundant. With time pressure becoming a thing, I don’t have time to spend on redundancies.

Relevance: Organization

It goes without saying that the more organized your life is, the more any given planning tool will potentially benefit you. What might not be necessarily so obvious is that this works in the other direction as well – using a planning tool automatically helps you become organized in aspects of your life that aren’t directly impacted, simply by helping your thought processes become more structured.

Your campaign planning notes, for example, will be more logically structured and sequenced because you broke down the tasks involved in generating them and performed them in a more focused and diligent manner. The structure of planning not only impacts the process, but also the product. And that makes for greater efficiency in performance at the game table.

No matter how tightly you confine your planning, the advantages that manifest mean that the principles and processes will start to spill over into everything else you do.

Relevance: Logical Structure

Those same principles also apply to campaign and adventure structure. Your first goal is to tell a story that incorporates the input and decisions from the players and that is interesting (if not compelling) and satisfactory. Adding excitement and originality and surprises on top of that is icing on the cake, and adding felicity of description is sprinkles on that icing.

• Be systematic — Start from the middle of an adventure and work backwards to establish all the building blocks that will get you to that point. Then work forward to a resolution of the adventure, backtracking to insert any building blocks that may be needed to make that resolution possible. Once you have an outline of the adventure, you can start finessing and refining and aiming for ‘satisfying’ and all those other good adjectives.
• Be logical — Assume that everyone will behave sensibly unless it’s consistent for them not to. If you need a PC (or an NPC) to make a different decision to the obvious one, you need to incorporate factors that rule the obvious solution out, and incorporate (possibly assumed) factors that nudge the preferred decision out ahead of the pack. Even mistakes should be logical ones for the character to make.
• Be organized — There WILL be times when the game will go off-script. Sometimes, you can let it go, because you can see that you will still end up rejoining the planned adventure somewhere down the track; at other times, you may need to finesse the course of events to steer the ship in the right general direction. Remember, the players have their hands on the tiller, you provide and define the winds and currents. Having your prep organized in such a way that you can make snap decisions about such diversions is obviously beneficial.
• Be analytic — All characters (and this includes NPCs) are complex harmonies between the character on the page and the personality of the player. The two interact in strange and sometimes unpredictable ways. The scale of offenses that you consider ‘more heinous than’ the preceding item on the list will subconsciously impact on the actions that you have your villains perform. Your players may have different opinions or criteria; when you ‘up the ante’ and they act like you’ve tossed a wooden nickle into the pot, you’ve tripped over an example of comparative morality. It’s highly likely that neither of you have analyzed these assessments; they get made by instinct. But noting that ‘player A in combination with character B rates X as more serious than Y’ begins the process of writing to the game and its participants, and not to the abstracted fiction of who the characters might be.
• Know how to abstract — The tools of flow-charting are one way to abstract the structure of an adventure. Knowing the building blocks and how they fit into the bigger picture is another. I employ both. This is all about seeing the shape of the forest as well as the trees that you have planted.
• Know how to use the abstract to simulate imperfectly — The rules may say that in situation A, B will happen. Or it might be the game genre. Or the game physics. Or simply a logical deduction. If you want C to happen instead, you need to change the circumstances and context so that either B doesn’t apply, or B leads logically to a consequence of C.
• Use all of the above to make and revise plans — Adventure Narrative – the flow from scene to scene. Plot Narrative – the overall storyline of the adventure. Local metaplot – how one adventure leads into or connects with the one before it and the one after it. Plot Arc metagame narrative – how events within an adventure connect via plot threads with other events in other adventures to tell a story that is broader than any single adventure. Background evolution – how consequences of events and actions within an adventure change and evolve the campaign background and the relations of the characters to it. Campaign meta-plan narrative – the compilation of multiple plot threads or plot arcs or whatever you want to call them, that combine to yield the totality of the campaign, with a storyline, often expressed as trends from one thing to another and leading to a big finish when everything comes to a head. These are a hierarchy of plans within plans within plans, from the innermost layers to the most externalized. Each step out forces greater generalization and abstraction; each step in breaks generalities into more granular logical components. These are all plans that you should make, at least in general terms, lest “it seemed like a good idea at the time” become your campaign’s epitaph.
• Ensure the essentials are covered first — Having everything that is essential at the bare minimum quality that you need to run means that the essentials are covered; if this is not the case, then your day’s play is on shaky ground. Sometimes, you can muddle through, surviving on wits and instinct and half-baked ideas – and sometimes those same things will trap you in quicksand. I always make sure that the essentials are ready to go; at the very least, these signpost what cleverness and half-baked ideas I need to throw into the recipe.
• Don’t assume you won’t indulge; build controls to limit your indulgence to reasonable levels — Everyone has some parts of the GMing process that they enjoy more than others. For me, it’s plotting and storytelling. For others, it might be acting a part, or interacting with a player, or taking the rules and bending them over your knee until they (metaphorically) cry ‘uncle’. Putting extra time and effort into those areas that we especially enjoy comes naturally and instinctively – and unquestionably qualifies as indulging yourself, assuming that the ‘minimum necessary prep’ has already been achieved. Budget a controlled amount of extra time to indulge yourself, and restrain yourself the rest of the time.
• Use realism to moderate extremes — The more fantastic the scene or story or genre or campaign is, the more an undercurrent of realism is necessary; you harness it to lend credibility and plausibility to those fantastic elements. The more gritty and realistic the scene or story or genre or campaign, the more you need a streak of the improbable or amazing or fantastic or farcical to elevate it out of that inherent mundanity. These are principles that have served me well for many years. There are times to embrace the extreme, and times to hide it in a box down a deep, dark well; knowing which one applies to any given situation is a learned skill that requires experience and experimentation to master.
• Use plans as guidelines when not under pressure and rules when you are — Your plans aren’t a straitjacket until you lock yourself into them. The overall goal is to entertain both yourself and the other participants; everything else can be tossed out the airlock if necessary. But there are guideposts that your next-level-up in planning requires you to reach; it’s not going too far to suggest that so long as you hit those key points, you don’t really care what happens the rest of the time so long as it entertains.
• Always plan to deadline — I don’t think it’s necessary to elaborate further on what’s already been said in this context. But there’s an additional set of deadlines to keep your eye on – your in-game deadlines, at a meta-level. You can’t pull the trigger on planned event A until conditions X, Y, and Z are met? Then the point at which A is due to happen to make best use of the campaign pacing and flow is the deadline for events to occur that establish conditions X, Y, and Z (hopefully not all at the same time!). This is just as much planning to deadline as making sure that you have something playable, come game day.

Relevance: Pacing

My ‘extra hour” is now almost up, so I won’t be able to spend as much time on this section as I would have liked. Certainly, a detailed analysis is out of the question. So, suffice it to suggest that if you can quantify the ‘urgency’ and ‘intensity’ of the campaign with some numeric score and a relationship between the two, however nebulous the assessment is, then you can budget your pacing by noting what contributes to slowing or speeding the pace, raising or lowering the intensity.

For more on this, see my (quite lengthy) series on pacing:

• Swell And Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 1
• Swell And Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 2
• Ask The GMs: Pacing Your Campaign
• Pacing and the value of the Pause
• Anatomy Of An Interruption – Endpoints
• Status Interruptus: Types Of Pause
• Compound Interruptions: Manipulating Pauses
• The Yu-Gi-Oh Lesson: New Inspirations In Pacing and Style
• Ask The GMs: An Epic Confusion, or how to stage a blockbuster finish
• A Grand Conclusion: Thinking about a big finish
• Shades Of Suspense Pt 1 – Eight Tips for Cliffhanger Finishes
• Shades Of Suspense Pt 2 – Fourteen Types of Cliffhanger Finishes

And that’s it, I’m right out of time. This “quick little post” is now over 8000 words long! Have fun out there, everyone.

This article started out as a way to save time and at the same time present some tips and tricks that often get overlooked in my scramble to get material ready for publication here. It was also intended (originally) to be part of last week’s 1000th-post celebration – so there are certain themes that will be continuation of the discussion of milestones – but that post grew to the point where I hadn’t even started on this and it was time to publish.

It also grew a LONG way beyond anything reasonable in very short order. As I write this, it’s probably only about half-done, and already measures more than 46,500 words!

The only solution is to break it up. And I don’t think I’m safe in breaking it into just two – instead, I’m looking at three parts. The problem is trying to estimate where the breakpoints should be, given that so much of it isn’t written yet.

But, there’s nothing that says that it has to be three equal divisions; that’s ideal, but not essential. So I’ve decided to break it along logical lines. I’m going to start by discussing the structural concepts, and a very broad breakdown of the actual application in play. I’ll conclude part 1 with excerpted synopses from the early part of the adventure and some notes concerning the content in general.

Part 2 will excerpt more synopses from the second major phase of the adventure – the ‘middle part’ of the movie trilogy, as it were – while Part 3 will cover the third part (so far), and look ahead (so far as is possible and practical, given that I don’t want to give my players too many spoilers) to the what will eventually be the equivalent of the fourth and fifth parts of this ‘trilogy’.

Along the way, I’ve observed all sorts of subtle tricks and tips that often get overlooked when dealing with more specific aspects of the art and craft of writing and running good adventures, which I’ll be calling out. These are things that I’m sometimes not even aware that I’m doing, recognizable only in hindsight. and that can be applied to the betterment of any number of campaigns, regardless of genre.

And there will be bits of material generated for this sweeping epic adventure – NPCs, game physics, alien races, local game settings, and more – that will also be potentially transferable to other campaigns.

Above all, though, this will strive to show you what I actually did in terms of writing and refereeing the adventure, and why I did things that way. This is as close a I can come to having readers actually look over my shoulder while I’m working, with me supplying a running commentary – and with (almost) all the tedious bits cut out. It will be a sometimes bumpy but very interesting ride!

As usual, when posting something this big and potentially ponderous, I’ll try to intersperse something smaller and lighter aimed at a slightly different part of the RPG audience. That helps both readers and myself stave off burnout!

The Tangled Web

When the previous Zenith-3 campaign (now referred to as Earth-Halo – something that I’ll explain a little later) began winding its way to a conclusion, there was a serious fork in the road presented by my players. My plans assumed one thing (and had done so from the very first game session), and what my players expected and were looking forward to was something very different.

Well, I could only give them about 70% of what they asked for, but that would be the best 70%. But it also meant that some of what I had originally intended would have to intrude upon, and form another layer of, this revised campaign.

This diagram illustrates the situation, and the solution, reasonably well. The players expected A, and then B, and then C. I expected to give them just C, with the occasional side-dish of A or B. My solution was to give them mostly B with recurring forays into A, conducting the two in parallel. That makes perfect sense because A, B, and C are all set in different parallel worlds. The way it works is that I can given them about 95% of A, about 5% of B, and about 50% of C – just enough to tie up all the loose ends, resolve every plot line that I intend the campaign to resolve, and for everything to climax at exactly the right point.

In fact, once I started compiling notes and plot arcs and putting everything together, the final plan came to look not only far better than either ABC or C alone would have been, but also pretty inevitable. I might have found this optimum configuration of ‘going where the story was’ without this compromise of expectations, but I equally might not. So I am far from unhappy about the outcome.

But that did mean that the plots weren’t entirely of the shape expected; when an important piece of a plotline in C is now happening in A, without any reasonable connection between them, you need to cut the diamond in two. Plotline A1 now needs a new resolution, while Plotline C1 needs a new “A1 equivalent’ component to make sense of future events.

Most of those problems weren’t too difficult to solve, using a variety of techniques. You’ll get to see some of them, and the inter-dimensional interplay that they created, described at the start of the first extracted synopsis.

One in particular, though, was more of a mess. The only way to solve it was with a protracted plot arc set in C. And thus, “The Tangled Web” was born.

The idea was, essentially, to create a whole new campaign set in C – call it D for identification purposes – in which all the pieces of this complicated plot arc, utterly necessary to other things along the way, could play out, essentially using the exact same technique – a campaign within a campaign within a campaign. In essence, every now and then, the PCs would jump out of the AB/C depicted in the diagram and instead jump into D for a while – and then go right back to where they had left from.

The adventure that this post (and the next, and the next) are all about is the one in which that D campaign gets established.

The Road To Hell is paved with plotlines (because intentions are never enough)

Have you ever noticed that pilot episodes of new TV series, or series reboots, are often double or even triple the length of any one episode? It’s not always the case, but it’s often true. That’s because there’s a lot to establish for the first time before the series can be considered a “stable” platform for the rest of the stories in that particular season, or the whole series, to play out in.

It’s often so with RPG campaigns, too – the first adventure is usually far longer than the expected norm.

“The Tangled Web” is certainly not an exception. In part, that’s because I felt it necessary to immerse the players in the new environment for a while. In part, it’s because I started using the creation of the campaign infrastructure as a vehicle for encounters and plots. In part, it’s because the PCs abilities effectively gave them almost unlimited time to get themselves set up and that takes a while to play out in real time. And, in part, it’s to give the new sub-campaign a concrete sense of plausibility. This was no light “what if” being played out, in which there could be lots of hand-waving; the players would be making decisions that would affect not only the course of the whole “D campaign”, but which would have ramifications and consequences back in the normal AB/C campaign.

The “Tangled Web” Itself

The sub-campaign’s plot framework rested on the PCs adopting a whole new set of identities, and adventuring in the guise of those identities. When you boil it down, the current adventure is fairly simple in structure:

1. Establish the need for the new identities
2. Establish a problem that meant it was these PCs who had to do the work
3. Establish the new identities in the minds of the players
4. Get the players used to the new identities
5. Explore the short-term ramifications of the new identities
6. Establish the basic infrastructure of the new campaign
7. Establish the new identities in the minds of “the public”
8. Resolve the original problem

Hey Presto! – ongoing sub-campaign that could progress at the speed of plot, and would last until it was no longer needed.

Items 1 and 2 on that list were taken care of in game session 2, after game session 1 was used to advance other plotlines from the AB/C campaign and tie up a few loose ends that I didn’t want to leave dangling for the whole of this adventure, effectively creating a baseline, character-wise.

Items 3 and 4, and some of the campaign background, formed a little mini-campaign inside the sub-campaign. So now we are four layers deep!

Items 5, and 6 are the part of the adventure currently playing out, and also form a mini-campaign within the overall adventure.

Items 7 and then 8 are to be the ‘operational phase’ of the new sub-campaign.

An Established Campaign

Ah, if only it were that simple. The Tangled Web came with a number of complicating curses.

• Legacies of the originally-intended campaign structure;
• Legacies of the ‘brilliant compromise’ (both of these should be no surprise, they were implied by what I’ve written above);
• Legacies of the fact that the AB/C campaign had been running for years, and the players were starting to get fairly comfortable with their characters’ situations, and seeing regular progress on some of the ongoing plotlines;
• Legacies of the fact that the AB/C campaign had been running for years, and the characters were fairly well established in the minds of the players; and
• Legacies of the plot elements and situations that had to come out of this ‘black box’.

Accommodating all of those meant that there was more campaign to establish than usual, and a few revelations to disburse, and some sacred cows to slay. In particular, I needed time for the players to settle in before they started making decisions about their futures, and that gave me the opportunity to introduce them to some building blocks for the future.

Some of those were always intended to be there, and some of them were simply me being creative – “I need something, this is a something that I haven’t done before and it makes sense in context, connecting the campaigns past to its future”. In other words, things that seemed to be good ideas at the time – time will tell whether they are as good as they appeared!

Structure Of this particular sub-campaign

If you look at the adventure from a high-level overview perspective, it becomes even simpler than the 8-part listing given earlier:

• Phase One: A Sense Of Reality / Spy Games
• Phase Two: The Long Walk
• Phase Three: The Road Trip
• Phase Four: Putting Down Roots
• Phase Five: The Final Plotline

But that’s a very superficial view of reality. When you display the logical structure, it becomes a bit more complicated:

• Phase One
  • A Sense Of Reality
  • Spy Games Pt 1
  • Spy Games Pt 2
• Phase Two: The Long Walk
  • Brazil to Jamaica to Guatemala to Guatemala
  • Guatemala to Tabasco
  • Tabasco to Veracruz
  • Veracruz to Leon
  • Leon to Coahuila
  • Coahuila to Laredo. Texas
  • Into Yesterday (times 30)
• Phase Three: The Road Trip
  • Road Trip Prep – Laredo Texas
  • Texas to Texarcana
  • Arkansas, Day 1 [Now!]
  • Arkansas, Day 2
  • Arkansas, Day 3
  • Arkansas, Day 4 & Rendezvous
  • Player’s Option: Missouri, Days 1, 2, 3, & 4
  • Player’s Option: Kansas Days 1, 2, 3, & 4
  • Player’s Option: Nebraska Days 1, 2, 3, & 4
  • A Place To Call Home
• Phase Four: Putting Down Roots
  • Player’s Alternative: Days 5-16
  • The Quest For Fame: Days 17-25
  • High Commerce & Misdemeanors
• Phase Five: The Final Plotline
  • On The Road Again (Day 26 to Oklahoma)
  • Rendezvous
  • Mission
  • Homecoming I: Shadowbase
  • Homecoming II: Zurich
  • Gifts For The Giving (Political Ramifications & Thank-yous)
  • Homecoming III: Be It Ever So Humble (Earth-Regency)

Even that view doesn’t capture the whole complexity. I can’t go into too much more detail at this point, because we’re still in Arkansas Day 1 – and I’m still writing (almost finished) Arkansas Day 2.

So let’s take a closer look at the five phases, and their content, and I’ll tell you what I can – ie, what the players already know.

Phase One: A Sense Of Reality / Spy Games

This provides the foundation for the sub-campaign. It divides into three key parts:

• A Sense Of Reality
• Spy Games Pt 1
• Spy Games Pt 2

The first part is simply housekeeping, moving the main campaign forwards, establishing the state of the PCs at the start of the adventure, and foreshadowing what was to come.

The second part was mostly an info-dump, dressed up as interactively as I could make it. After some color to show the PCs “the state of the technological art” – i.e. what was possible and what wasn’t (important since they were used to 2055 in Dimension A (Earth Regency), about 100 years more advanced than Dimension C (1986 Earth-Prime), I briefed the PCs on the relevant local parts of the game history (in more detail than they had seen before, and advanced by about 2 game years since the last report the players had read), and established the need for them to Go Covert to deal with the immediate threat, and any similar threats that might arise in the future. It also dealt with the “how” of that covert operation.

The third part was a deliberate tonal contrast to the grim seriousness of the second, and dealt with the question of how you sneaked into someplace that was both paranoid and had state-of-the-art technology and lots of it. It also showed that global politics produced some strange bedfellows, which in turn influenced those bedfellows in unexpected ways, and broadened some of the simplistic views held by the players on behalf of their characters.

Phase Two: The Long Walk

Phase Two gets the PCs into position to start their primary mission. It uses distance as a plot vehicle, and had almost as much in common with a fantasy campaign as it did super-heroics.

It breaks down naturally into seven legs, most of which are very similar in nature:

• Brazil to Jamaica to Guatemala to Guatemala
• Guatemala to Tabasco
• Tabasco to Veracruz
• Veracruz to Leon
• Leon to Coahuila
• Coahuila to Laredo. Texas
• Into Yesterday (times 30)

The first part simply used Spy Games Part 2 to propel the party from Brazil to Central America. The Jamaican intermission laid groundwork for what was to follow and did a little foreshadowing, while drawing a line under the “Spy Games” – it marked the completion of the transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2. And, appropriately therefore, it had one last little gasp of the Spy Games.

Parts 2 through 6 essentially had the same basic internal structure:

• Border, first impressions
• Transportation Tech
• Border to Ruler, Local color along the way
• Interaction with the Ruler & Court, Assigned challenge / mini-adventure
• Ruler to scene of challenge / mini-adventure
• Challenge / mini-adventure
• Progress to next border via intermediary points

Each one would put a somewhat different spin on this basic formula; it would have its own technology, its own society and culture, it’s own roleplayed interactions, and so on. There was also an ongoing plot thread as the team and their escort first came to respect each other, then to trust each other, and then to become friends and (unofficial) allies. This also created fresh perspectives on the political briefing that they had been given, and further advanced plotlines that had started in preceding adventures, so it greatly enriched the game world as experienced by the PCs.

In terms of game sessions, the basic structure generally broke down into two game sessions in each Mexican Kingdom. In general, each challenge / mini-adventure started with a cliffhanger, so that marked the dividing line between the first game session and the second. But I did not hold to a slavish consistency; I simply stopped play at the first “good” point when time was running out. A “good” point was one that was convenient first, and dramatic, second.

Those trends all came to a mini-crescendo (the imminent end of the world) in part 7, which also gave the players the tools for part 8, which is where the players were “given the keys” and started actually dictating the pace and content to at least some extent.

It should never look like there’s a GM pulling the strings, at least not to the PCs, even if events are the result of complex interactions between GM and players at a meta-level. While some things will be the result of “life just happens”, if it’s an important decision, players should be given as much latitude to decide things for themselves – even if that involves a certain amount of tedium.

In this case, the players decided how far back in time they were going to go. There were obvious benefits to them of having more prep time, but there were also obvious difficulties and consequences made clear to them. The rational minimum choice was 4 days, the maximum reasonable was 30 days, and it was up to them where they landed in that range. They decided to push things to the maximum, which simply meant that the consequences of that decision would be more severe and require more effort to overcome.

Phase Three: The Road Trip

Phase two had used distance as a plot vehicle by spacing disparate cultures and situations far enough apart that one was distinctively different from another. Phase three uses travel itself as a plot vehicle; instead of events dictating where and when the PCs go, as in phase 2, in phase 3, where and when the PCs go dictates events.

Here’s the breakdown:

• Road Trip Prep – Laredo Texas
• Texas to Texarcana
• Arkansas, Day 1 [Now!]
• Arkansas, Day 2
• Arkansas, Day 3
• Arkansas, Day 4 & Rendezvous
• Player’s Option: Missouri, Days 1, 2, 3, & 4
• Player’s Option: Kansas Days 1, 2, 3, & 4
• Player’s Option: Nebraska Days 1, 2, 3, & 4
• A Place To Call Home

The breakdown is more complicated, simply because it has to accommodate decisions that the players haven’t made yet. The original plan that was given to them was that they should do a little basic research on the four states most suited to their various purposes – Arkansas, Missouri,, Kansas, and Nebraska, that they should spend a day or two finding a base of operations in their chosen state, then rush off to Oklahoma and what is now Phase 5.

The players were more pessimistic, and decided to give themselves more time to thoroughly explore each state instead of making a relatively blind choice. And that their lives would be considerably easier if they established their new superheroic identities in the public consciousness (and in the consciousness of law-enforcement) before the real curtain went up. So they decided to spend 4 days on each state, then establish their chosen base of operations (which is what’s now Phase 3), spend as long as necessary making it ready to operate and getting that 15 minutes of fame (in Phase 4) before putting it all to its intended use in Phase 5.

So, if that’s what they decided to do, that’s what we would do. But I think they underestimated how successful they could or would be; having made a start in Arkansas (simply because it’s the closest one of their targets to their Texas starting point) I doubt that they will feel any need to look at the others. Which means that instead of only having Days 17-25 to set up shop and get semi-famous, they will probably have days 5-25 for the purpose.

In fact, I expect there to be serious hesitation about continuing the search past Day 1, but think that the NPCs have a reasonable argument about it being worth at least doing the one state properly. And that hesitation will probably double after Day 2! I’ll do my game prep according to what they look likely to decide, using the prevailing winds; if there are any interesting encounters that get bypassed, I’ll involve them in Phase 4.

Each of the “Days” can be further broken down into a series of overlapping repeated structures, each elegantly simple. The main one is:

• Drive to the next town;
• Check their Guidebook’s entry for the town en route;
• Drive through it looking for potential Bases Of Operations (BOps);
• Evaluate the suitability of the town;
• Evaluate the suitability of each potential BOps;
• Leave town.

Repeat, again and again. It’s the difference of one community from another that makes each evaluation, each in-game event, more than just a repetition. The PCs have broken up into two teams with one NPC and two PCs each operating independent of the other, doubling the speed with which events occur in-game.

Over the top of that, and helping to draw out or add to the distinctiveness of each local exploration, are a number of other recurring loops:

• The roads are in different conditions, and that makes an occasional point of difference;
• The cars they have chosen have limited range. Every now and then they have to refuel – but they are on a very tight budget (not as bad as it originally looked, but still…
• A ten-minute break every couple of hours to freshen up and grab a snack, depending on what’s available;
• A driver change every 4 hours behind the wheel, or more often as necessary;
• Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. The basic plan they have chosen is to rise at the break of dawn, Eat, and get underway about 20 minutes later;
• After 12 hours (which includes the lunch break and the scheduled rest stops, they are finished for the day and can start looking for a campsite with about an hour’s daylight to set up their tents, and get an evening meal;
• Once the sun sets, each team goes over the choices they have encountered each day, and winnows their list down to the best three candidates so far (assuming that they find that many; one has, so far, one hasn’t – yet). They then have a team meeting to discuss any team policy questions and generally check in with each other before they call it a night.

Spicing all of that up even more, there are occasional encounters of an interesting nature. These started back in Phase 2, and will continue throughout Phases 3 and 4 – and, presumably, into Phase 5 as well. Those become more frequent on Day 2 (at the moment, I haven’t started really preparing Day 3, that will depend on decisions the PCs will make at the end of Day 1).

Each community is being extensively researched and illustrated.

And yes, for those who may be interested, I’m not only tracking how fast the cars are traveling at any given point, what that speed is doing to their fuel economy, how far they are traveling at those speeds (to the 10th of a mile) and how long travel and exploration are taking each team each time according to the size of the community and what there is to see (to the minute) using a spreadsheet created for the purpose. It also tracks time spent on the breaks and refueling, and on other interruptions, and how far ahead or behind schedule they are.

So it’s going to be up to the players when they end Phase Three by moving to the final part – the purchase and setting up of their chosen base. I don’t even know what that will entail at this point, because it’s going to depend on which location they choose. As the time gets closer, I’ll have a better idea – for example, right now, there is one leading contender. By the end of Day 1 (if not sooner), there will be a short-list, and the methodology that one of the NPCs came up with – (a) because that’s kinda his Shtick, and (b) because it did what the players wanted it to do in an obviously-rational way – keeps that shortlist down to three contenders each. So I will have a shortlist of maybe six to deal with when the time comes.

Phase Four: Putting Down Roots

If the players cut their road trip short (I expect them to, but don’t know how short), then game-time days will move from Phase Three to Phase 4. The first listed part of this phase is nothing more than a placeholder for any such ‘extra in-game time’; officially, Phase 4 starts with Day 17:

• Player’s Alternative: Days 5-16
• The Quest For Fame: Days 17-25
• High Commerce & Misdemeanors

Any extra days will be exactly the same, content-wise, as days 17-25. I actually expect this to be about 50-50 GM planned events and player-chosen activities. It will be interesting seeing what they decide to do to fill their time! Large parts of this time will also probably be hand-waved.

Day 26 is when things start getting real. Half of Day 26 is in Phase 4, and half in Phase 5 – the PCs have to do certain things with financing to preserve the timeline that they have already experienced, a card that I can also use to make sure that Day 2 (and potentially, days 3 and 4) of Arkansas exploration take place as planned. This will also let me increase the amount of hand-waving that I do, and potentially complicate the PCs lives for a while in days 5-16 if they choose The Player’s Alternative.

This is an important point that’s worth emphasis: the structure, for all that it looks quite structured and orderly, is actually dynamic, and will change with PC decisions. Variable constraints like “Experienced History” give me a measure of control over what game prep I have to do!

It’s probably worth noting, too, that if it weren’t for Covid lockdowns (which have cost us about 6 game sessions, to date) mean that right now, the campaign should be close to finishing up Day 2, instead of being in the middle of Day 1..

Phase Five: The Final Plotline

Which brings me to the last part of this adventure, and the reason why it is all one big adventure – Phase 5 is all about preventing the problem that the PCs were hit with back in Spy Games Part 1 from becoming an emergency that could and would reshape world politics, undoing a lot of the progress that has been made behind the scenes in the campaign over the two years (game time) that I mentioned earlier.

The structure is quite straightforward:

• On The Road Again (Day 26 to Oklahoma)
• Rendezvous
• Mission
• Homecoming I: Shadowbase
• Homecoming II: Zurich
• Gifts For The Giving (Political Ramifications & Thank-yous)
• Homecoming III: Be It Ever So Humble (Earth-Regency)

It starts with the PCs driving to Oklahoma from wherever they have set up their BOps. This will be a very compressed variation on the basic pattern of Phase 3. On Day 27, in Rendezvous, they will meet up with the Agent who discovered the problem (and who has continued to investigate it since his initial reports). It’s also when there starts being two copies of the same character in the same dimension at the same time (even though they are different points on their personal timeline), which is extremely wearing and will reduce the PCs firepower significantly, a consequence the PCs have already experienced, and noticed, but whose cause they misinterpreted at the time.

That then leads them into the actual Mission that they have done all this traveling to complete. They have no idea what’s going to be involved but they know that the critical day will be Day 30. At a specific time on Day 30, for a few hours, there will in fact be three copies of them co-existing, and they will really feel the strain. Again, they have already experienced this, though they misunderstood the real reasons why it was happening at the time.

These effects were deliberately set up to avoid “The Cheating Student” solution to PCs with time-travel capability who are experiencing time pressure.

A student who can time travel is facing a big exam. He knows that with an extra week/month/whatever to cram, he can get a passing grade. So he time travels into his past to get that extra time prior to the big exam.

The superhero equivalent is, “We’ve got this problem, let’s time-travel into the past and spend a month or two coming up with strategies and tactics and rehearsing them endlessly”.

It makes problems too easy to solve, and makes gameplay boring as all heck. The general principle that gets applied is that if there are N of you active in the same space-time at the same time, each of them is diminished to only one (N+1)th of their usual capabilities. The in-game physics that justifies this restriction is complicated and not really relevant here.

The alternative is to permit time-travel to generate infinite points of skills on demand. And the dues-ex-machinas that it circumvents are enormous. “Okay, so we need a supernova reactor to stop this guy? I’ll just go back 25 years and start whipping one up – and here it is, now.”

Not on my watch, bucko.

Oh, and you can’t use a different dimension to get around this restriction because the two parallel worlds are linked by your personal timeline for the duration – so, in this respect only, they can be considered one for such purposes.

Homecoming I takes the PCs back to their new base, wherever it is, and mothballs it ready for the next time they need it.

Homecoming II then has them head off to Zurich to report to the agency that put them onto this sleight-ride in the first place.

Gifts for the Giving is all about saying thank you to those who helped them achieve the mission; they include setting up a more formal informal relationship with their new ally, and pleading the case of a bunch of Alien Refugees that they have encountered, and so on.

And finally, Homecoming III takes them back to Earth-Regency and starts reintegrating them with the lives that they had to put on hold back in the first part of the first phase.

Just The Beginning

Of course, at some future point, they will be summoned to resume their lives as Team Shadow. It might be next week, or next month – it’s unlikely to be tomorrow, and it’s very unlikely to be more than a couple of months away, but within these limits, all bets are off!

The Size Of The Web

This adventure ie reasonably vast in scope for all that it’s been fairly tightly confined, and sweepingly epic in many other respects.

So far,

• 3,887 words of high-level planning, and
• 249,632 words of adventure (on 381+ pages), and
• 12,315 words of reference material, and
• 36,145 more words of research (some of which was described in How Good Is That Rust-bucket In The Showroom Window?), and
• 768 words of notes, have been done – that’s about 302,747 words in total!
• …plus 4 spreadsheets (including the one offered in The Price of Bricks and Soil (and more) a couple of weeks ago, and
• 1,593 photographs & illustrations, including maps (with some duplication and redundancy)…

…have all been done, and I’m doing more all the time. I want to at least get to the end of “Day 2” before stopping work.

All that represents a huge investment in time, too. But that’s how it is that I am 6-7 game sessions ahead of play in my game prep, and, of course, I started about two years ago.

More Complications: Day 2

I wasn’t originally going to explain this, but it gives a false impression if I don’t.

On Day 2, there’s an option (that the players will decide on at the end of Day 1) for a side-trip for one of the cars. I started by writing one version of Day 2 where they take that side-trip, and found that about half-way through the side-trip they would probably conclude that it had served its’ purpose and cut it short.

Now, I’m working on the version of Day 2 where they don’t choose to make the side-trip. The way I have structured the documents

This is not wasted effort, because if they do take the side-trip, these locations will get visited in Day 3, and if they don’t, some of the ‘best bits’ will reappear in the “get famous” segment of Phase 4. The only real content that can’t be ported across completely is in locating and setting up their campsite for the evening, and the evening meal.

Still more complications: Day 3

The same team also have the option of a side-trip on Day 3. This probably won’t be undertaken if the do the Day 2 side-excursion, but might if they don’t. So I would, in theory have to write their content four ways:

• No side-trips;
• Side-trip one only (means they start Day 3 in a different location and will end it in a different location);
• Side-trip two only (means they will end Day 3 in a different location); and,
• Both side-trips.

At the same time, the other team will also have the opportunity to choose to make a side-trip (which I’ll refer to as ‘Side-trip 3 for clarity). Unlike the first two, which are into the neighboring states of Mississippi and maybe a bit of Tennessee, Side-trip 3 simply takes in additional parts of Arkansas that the original schedule didn’t have room for.

It’s also worth noting that long before I have to actually start work on these variations, I’ll know which ones are really going to be needed, and which ones won’t.

Still more complications: Day 4

And, on Day 4 (if they continue that far), there’s potential side-trips for each car, both of the ‘Side-trip 3’ kind – entirely within Arkansas, simply adding more places to the list. I think both of these are, at best, 50-50, a lot depending on what earlier choices have been made.

The Tangled Web Synopses (so far) and supplementary notes

And so we come to the heart of this three-part article. At the start of each game session, I provide a synopsis of ‘the story so far’ for the benefit of the players (and I use them too, as reference in writing adventure content). I have excerpted those synopses as a series of snapshots of the adventure as it has unfolded.

In some early cases, no synopsis was preserved for some reason, so I’ve crafted new ones as necessary just for this article. Perhaps it was because those parts of the story were so strongly episodic, were completely wrapped up in the one game session.

Things to watch out for:

• The Evolution of the campaign-within-a-campaign as it progresses – this was a deliberate feature, starting with the PCs having one impression and discovering that there was more to the story.
• The embedding of plot hooks – raw material for future plotlines, many with no fixed purpose – as the sub-campaign progresses. If you ever thing to yourself, “I can see a number of potential plotlines using that” about some piece of content, you’ll have recognized an embedded plot hook.
• The impact of PC Decisions – while certain signposted content might be deliberately incorporated, a substantial amount of that was actually delivered in the second game session. Much of the rest of the adventure was either there to justify giving the players that briefing, or as a consequence of the briefing content. Which meant that I was happy to adapt and evolve the content in response to players making decisions for their characters.
• There are a lot of mini-adventures along the way. Some of those were deliberately emplaced, some were used to plant plot hooks, some were there to layer additional ramifications from the game background, and some were just for fun or to control the pacing. But, once the principle of using the trip from nation-state to nation-state as a plot vehicle was established, each leg needed one – so you will have to look fairly closely to see which category any given mini-adventure fits into.
• As part of that: I deliberately set out to make each challenge to the PCs (and hence the players) of a different kind. I’ve talked around that point in the structural discussion earlier in the article, so won’t belabor the point further here.
• Plot Twists & surprises – There have been a number of these along the way. I’ll try to point them out in the rather broad ‘notes’ content after each synopsis (and sometimes inserted into the middle of the synopsis.
• Tonal changes as the plot moves from section to section.
• Pacing changes, both section to section and within a section, and the buildup to important crescendos.

If my intended structural technique has worked (it didn’t but I persevered and overcame!), then you will find each synopsis color-coded, so you’ll be able to see immediately if what you’re looking at is a continuation of the synopsis you were reading or is the start of something new. I’ve tried to use headings to help with that as well.

It’s important to remember, as you read them, that these were written to be contemporary to the game session in which they were delivered. While I’ve tried to go through and set all of them into the past tense, It’s inevitable that I’ve missed bits here and there.

Synopsis, Session 1

Thursday, Feb 16, 2056, The Knightly Building, Earth-Regency [NB: Calendar does not quite match up with ours]

The adventure started with a debriefing following a mission conducted in between game sessions at Paris Island. While the mission itself was relatively straightforward, it was complicated by strange psychological changes within the team.

The trouble started when Vala reported that the former Blackwing kept trying to pull away from her mental link. He proceeded to hesitate repeatedly and seemed to lack confidence.

At the same time, Runeweaver seemed to suffer from the opposite problem – he was aggressive, over-enthusiastic, almost manic, literally blowing the tops off roofs and ripping walls open to get to marine out into the open.

And, when the former Blackwing did engage, in the form of a faceless metal man, he almost beat the ex-marine to death, seemingly afraid of using less than his full strength.

Vala, as the ex-Blackwing is explaining himself, you suddenly realize that every time you had previously made mental contact with Blackwing, it was actually with the Suit’s simulation of the person inside. This was the first time you have actually made a link with the real Paul Delancourt, and with the recent discovery of how the suit had been manipulating his thoughts, it’s no surprise that he’s a little sensitive to mental contacts of all sorts at the moment.

Blackwing then explained his mindset during the mission, stating that he was still in a state of shock over the revelations of Morbane Alpha, and at the same time every time he had gone into battle in the past, he had either been wearing a suit of armor or it hasn’t really been him. Even though he had shape-changed into a metallic form, it still felt like he was charging into combat naked. And then, when he did engage the enemy, that same feeling wouldn’t let him use less than everything he had; he couldn’t seem to pull himself back into line because he was afraid it wouldn’t be enough, even though intellectually, he immediately knew better.

Defender offered to teach the former Blackwing a training technique that combines what he learned as a Kzin Warrior and the lessons of “Master Dragon’s Claw” called the Soul Walk. This offer was accepted, and it was generally agreed that Blackwing, now released from the curse that was tainting his soul, just needed to get used to his new situation. He also felt that it was time to adopt a new superhero identity, or more properly, to return to his original one of Knight. It was then suggested that actually manifesting a suit of armor might alleviate the sense of vulnerability that had affected him on Paris Island, a notion that he immediately took on board.

Attention then turned to Runeweaver, who said that he had found it so pleasurable to be able to cast spells without worrying about the spell going out of control as they had done on so many recent occasions that he simply went a little overboard in the resulting head-rush. But a Mana Recharge had been the equivalent of taking a deep breath and let him get a hold of himself.

The others, aware of his deepening dependence on the euphoria of his Mana recharges, were concerned but this was at least plausible. Time would tell whether or not this was the beginning of a new stage of his problems or an isolated occurrence.

Defender was uncertain to what extent a soul walk would benefit Runeweaver, but it would not be harmful and might help him ‘recover his center’. He was also concerned that Runeweaver had neither mentioned, nor seemingly made allowance for, the influence that the Blackwing Armor was exerting on Runeweaver’s emotional state by shifting every doubt and uncertainty from Blackwing to that of the mage, almost as though he was denying it.

St Barbara decided not to use her authority to order either of them to attempt the Soul Walk or to undergo professional counseling under Vala, at least for now; having identified the problems, she would give both the chance to sort themselves out. The newly-renamed Knight seemed eager to undergo the process, and Runeweaver seemed intensely curious about it, so both were strongly motivated to take positive steps. And, aware of the problem, the other team members could be on the alert for it.

She had hoped that the team was getting out from under a shadow when Blackwing’s probation was reviewed and cut short, but it now seems some even deeper, darker shadows were lurking behind them, just waiting for their chance to leap out at her.

With the mission evaluation complete, Kira – the building’s AI and newly-hired secretary – then advised that the recent interactions with the Texas state police had resulted in greater enthusiasm for the proposed Liaison Program than expected; 143 applications for training in coordinating with the superhero team had been received from different law-enforcement agencies, divisions, and precincts, and were now being held for Knight’s approval.

After the meeting, Knight had trouble lifting the super-dense coffee mug that he had been gifted by Warcry. In fact, he could barely budge it; only after shape-changing into a metal form with enhanced strength could he move it. Clearly, he would have to learn and adapt to a more human level of casual strength. Taking a sip of the extra-strong blend that he preferred, he discovered that he could not taste it at all – he may as well have been pouring the black brew down the throat of a steel statue. Shrugging, he reverted to human and pulled down a standard-sized coffee mug, which he dipped into the bucket-sized orifice of his Blackwing-sized mug – and almost gagged on the strength of the indescribably-bitter concoction. Clearly, he would have to make some adjustments.

Later that afternoon, Defender took Knight to the Danger Room where he had prepared the Soul Walk, as it provided a reasonably resilient environment to anything that Knight might inadvertently throw at it. He explained that he would create a very cloudy fog which would numb the hero’s conscious thoughts. He would start to see shapes in the fog that weren’t really there, but that would be manifestations of his inner thoughts. The fog would respond to his thoughts of what he was seeing by making these creations appear more clear and solid, but they could not harm or be harmed by the Soul Walker. Some people saw many things in succession, others a more profound single image; either way, most things experienced would have multiple meanings to the individual and most would have some spiritual or allegorical relevance. Some might be straightforward, others might be attempts to self-deceive, and some might simply be obscure. Even seeing nothing would have a meaning; the Soul Walk did not provide answers, it asked leading questions that only pretended to be impertinent answers. As the Guide, Defender’s physical reality would also be reinterpreted by the Walker.

Blackwing discovered that he equated punishment with the attention of a parent, because that was the only attention that had been paid to him as a child. Accordingly, he had lived his life creating such situations for himself. This had led him to give in to the corruption of the suit of armor that had possessed him, and let it assume responsibility for life even as it kept him feeling safe and warm. He desired to leave innocence behind and take charge of his life, but feared that he was nothing but the child and the pain. But that was only the beginning of what became an even more profound experience, as his future choices (as he perceived them) were laid bare. His task was to decide how to fill the empty shell that was his self-perception and with what. He was going to be learning what it all meant for some time to come. He also had a newfound depth of respect for the combination of Kzin Warrior Philosophy, Kzin Social Customs, and Eastern Martial Arts that compounded to create his teammate. His abilities might be the flashier contribution, but his spiritual guidance was, perhaps, the more profound.

After he had cleansed himself of the residual effects of Knight’s Soul Walk, Defender summoned Runeweaver for the mage’s experience. After explaining what to expect, and answering a few questions, the session began with Runeweaver as a young man, fishing with his Grandfather, who was dispensing sage advice. Their conversation suggests that the mage’s life choices were, at least in part, an attempt to run from grief over the loss of his father, and in part an attempt to prove to himself that he was ready to live without that father – significant, because he had never been especially close to his father. And those choices then led him to make commitments that kept him from being with his grandfather when he passed, adding a layer of guilt to the motivational brew. He discovered that his early life had taught him that he could get approval from adults by studying hard, making him something of an over-achiever, almost ready to bite off a bit more of a challenge than was already on his plate. His childhood experiences also led him to take setbacks personally, blaming himself for being insufficiently prepared for the challenge. Again, there was more to the experience, in particular concerning the mage’s relationship with his mentor and father-figure, Ivar. The sum of all his experiences had led him to spend his life raising his personal standards until no-one could possibly live up to them, then engineering excuses for his failure to live up to those standards so that he could not be blamed. The significance and meaning of the would take longer to prize out than the comparatively straightforward vision experienced by Knight.

Later that afternoon, Defender made his way to Vala’s quarters to consult the alien telepath; he had realized that the team had a possible problem, but wanted her opinion on whether or not it was important enough to lay in St Barbara’s lap immediately. Most of the team were not native to the Earth-Regency space-time; Karlos Green, the Royal Family’s problem-solver, who they had recently recruited, knew that they were from elsewhere, but not from where. Inevitably, a mission would arise that would summon them back to Earth-Prime; statistically, they were overdue for one, and it would probably be big enough that the team would need his assistance. In an emergency, the team might not have the luxury of breaking the news to him gently; might it not be better to educate him in the things that he would have to know, if-and-when, in advance? He had designed such a program, but the optimum delivery method needed to integrate Runeweaver’s Magic and her Psionics – two normally incompatible ways of manipulating reality. Could she, for example, create the education program and ‘project’ it into one of her psionic crystals, while Runeweaver created a ‘reader’ for such a crystal. Intrigued by the prospect of doing something that she had previously thought impossible, Vala grew excited over the project and insisted on taking the proposal to St Barbara immediately.

The team leader, meanwhile, received a message encoded “Cypher Black” and rated as “Priority Alpha-Two”. ‘Cypher Black’ was a code produced by UNTIL [of Earth-Prime] for absolute top-secret communications with the Champions – things that must never appear on any official record. Priority Alpha-Two sounded like an UNTIL designation as well, but Zenith-3 didn’t use those message flags, she had to look up what it meant in her UNTIL Operations Manual – 1,570 pages of teeny-tiny type written by UNTIL’s legal division, and annotated into Plain English (or Japanese, or whatever) by UNTIL’s Command division so that you don’t need a lawyer to understand it. Fortunately, a copy came with the job of being Team Chairman, and had been gathering dust in her Safe. Alpha designated a crisis or emergency situation requiring immediate attention, while the sub-designation “-two” meant to ‘prepare to commence operations as directed within as a matter of urgency’ but permitted a short interval of time for the Agent receiving the instructions to make any preparations for a lengthy assignment that they deemed necessary.

Putting all that together, it suggested a classified Black Op, probably lasting more than a day, being instigated by UNTIL behind the Champions backs, in response to some crisis or emergency – but nothing so critical that the team can’t take an hour or so to prepare for it, whatever it was. It sounded like they were all suddenly in the Spy Game, whether they liked it or not.

That was when Defender and Vala arrived with their proposal. It was a nice idea, but depending on the sealed orders (which St Barbara still had to decode and decipher). might be a little too late. Karlos was more of a natural secret agent than any of the team; depending on the nature of the mission, they might find his presence invaluable. Since he would need to know about the team’s extra-dimensional origins and horrendously-complicated command structure sooner or later, and the underlying physics of dimensional/time-travel, and the practical consequences, she sent the pair to ‘educate’ him. Every experience told her that he was trustworthy. It would be a rude awakening that they were more than defenders of the British Empire, but since that political institution formed a subset of their responsibilities, she thought that he would be onboard – and deserved to know the scale of the problems that the team occasionally had to deal with.

Decoding the message, she found it long on urgent orders and short on explanations. A full briefing would be provided at UNTIL Headquarters at 2300 hours Monday June 31, 1986. The rest of the message told her that the team had to attend, how to disguise themselves, how to travel to the meeting to minimize exposure, and NOT to tell the Champions about any of it. They had to think that the team were still in Dimension-Regency, until UNTIL were good and ready to tell them otherwise.

Cloak-and-dagger – not something the team usually got mixed up in. She could already sense a headache in her near future.

Shortly before 11 PM, Monday June 30, 1986, Earth-Prime
UNTIL Headquarters is located in Geneva, Switzerland. Once, it had been a single building; it now occupied an entire valley in easy reach of the Swiss capital, a suburb in its own right (albeit a small one).

There is a railway station linking the facilities to the rest of Geneva and an underground Maglev for UNTIL personnel use that links the 43 separate multi-story buildings together, which were dug more deeply into the rock than they projected skywards.

It was a routine security measure not to use the front entrance of the building that you were actually there to visit; instead, you picked any other building, used it to access the high-speed Maglev loop, using it to reach the building you actually wanted to go to.

Building Delta proved to be one of the largest buildings in the Headquarters, and was the designated hub of Active Operations. Different geographic regions of the world were assigned to different floors (including a few exotic ones located off-planet). Sub-regions had individual corridors containing offices devoted to individual countries; in addition, some had specific operational interests being pursued outside the scope of the National Commands, with their own offices. Every floor had a different shape, with a different number of corridors running off from the central hub.

Room 1317 was on the 8th floor from the bottom, in the Pan-American section. There was a corridor for South America, another for Central America, and three more for (respectively) Western, Eastern, and Northern North America. At the end of the Eastern and Western America corridors was a large curving meeting room connecting both, labeled Room 1317, USA Operations. There was probably a similar joint command linking the South and Central Commands.

A large collection of senior UNTIL brass was waiting in silence in the room when the team arrived, obeying large signs that read “Your silence is required until Command deems it safe for you to speak”.

Present, in ascending order of rank, were:

• Captain Reginald Schwartz of the Resources Division;
• Major Heinrich Wasser, Chief Strategist of the Operations Division;
• Colonel Mason Courage III, Commander of the North American subdivision;
• Colonel Pablo Martinez, Commander of the South American subdivision;
• Brigadier Norma Raid, Head of the Champions Division;
• Major-General Dennis Smith, Commander of the Intelligence division;
• Major-General Patrick O’Kelly, Head of the Political Division;
• Major-General Oscar Holder, Head of the Legal Division; and
• Brigadier-General Isobel Dimitrov, Head of the Command Section of the Operations Division.

Some cloak-and-dagger with high-tech voice transformation devices followed so that operational personnel could participate with no chance of their identities being compromised. These gave every participant a random voice and random national accent. UNTIL had not yet been able to miniaturize them sufficiently for field usage, but they were used in the highest of high-level meetings for added security. They also briefed the team on how UNTIL had adapted to keep meetings secure in a world with Telepaths.

Backlash, the ex-head of UNTIL and current Chairman of the Champions (the PC’s parent organization and their superiors when they are on Earth-Prime) then made a spectacular entrance, announcing, “Ah, there you are Brigadier-General! I had to look all over to find you. You didn’t really think you could pull off something of this magnitude and only tell me after the fact, did you? Or did my invitation get lost in the mail?”

It soon became obvious that the two were old friends, and in fact, Backlash was once Dimitrov’s “Boss”. In the course of their re-acquantance and discussion, Dimitrov let slip that even allies being told could get them all locked up without keys, the matter was so delicate.

Key Points & Notes

You get a completely different sense of relevance from the first part of this adventure when you realize that the characters will soon get to spend a prolonged period pretending to be someone other than themselves. This content will also be relevant when we get to the encounter with the Coahuila Oracle, and goes to who the PCs actually are.

Other aspects of that early part of the story that will be relevant later are the role occupied by Defender as “Spirit Guide” and the peculiar fusion of the culture created for his species and the Samurai/Eastern philosophies he later adopted – parts of the resulting combination are strongly reminiscent of Amerind culture, but that was only realized after the fact. It comes across a lot more strongly in the synopsis of play than it did at the game-table at the time.

For some reason, no synopsis was actually preserved from the first couple of game sessions; the preceding and what follows below have been newly compiled from the original adventure notes.

These synopses (when we actually get to one produced for game use) were never intended to be a complete ongoing narrative summary of events; they were a reminder to the players who participated. That means that they often leave a lot of things out.

These omissions are most readily noticed when one compares the situation at the start of play (i.e. after a synopsis has been delivered) with the narrative of the next synopsis, and notes things that have been taken for granted because the players actually experienced them.

Some of the omitted content will be inserted here and there as I go along; more will be gathered into post-synopsis sections of analysis like this one, together with other notes that I feel worth calling out.

As with most of the adventures that I run in this campaign, I like to start by anchoring the events in the personal lives of the PCs, making them more than just ‘crime-fighting machines’. Events in these personal lives passages often presage or influence character states of mind during subsequent decisions, and sometimes provide context, subtext, or counterpoint. They can also sometimes provide a narrative thread binding loose plot elements into a cohesive whole. Quite often, its the players who decide what their characters make of these things; I focus on making sure that they fulfill any plot need and sound credible, and any additional meaning that the players read into them is a total bonus.

It is also worth noting that many of these character developments are not pulled out of thin air, but are the result of conversations with the players about their characters, sometimes from months or years earlier. On rare occasions, they can be completely wide of the mark, but my understanding of the characters is fairly substantial at this point; that doesn’t happen often.

One other subtle point that I’m not even sure the players have noticed; I’m very careful to refer to the characters by their “operational identities” at the time. The early adventure, therefore, has references to St Barbara, Knight/Blackwing, and so on, but once they assume their new identities, the references will be to Nightshade, Basalt, etc. They may be the same character, with the same player, but this helps distinguish between the two.

What’s not quite so clear in some of these synopses is whether or not the characters were acting in civilian guise or super-identity. I did contemplate using search and replace to name characters according to civilian guise at the time, but decided that this would only make things harder for the casual reader to know who was doing what.

Besides, at this point in time, those civilian identities are just a ‘cloak’ that the PCs happen to be wearing; they haven’t actually been playing Clark Kent, they’ve been playing Superman in a three-piece suit. That changes with the last part of phase 3, when they start playing those identities as the default. It’s probably fair to say that their “real” civilian identities didn’t get a lot of air time until I deliberately began exploring some of those identities a few years ago, too – they had been superheros pretty much full-time for years of play prior to that.

The entrance of Backlash is actually more important than it seems at the time. When he offers up the equivalent of “I have my sources” as answer to the unspoken question of how he knew about this top-secret meeting, and then focuses on his friendship with his former subordinate, there’s such an obvious unspoken answer that the players didn’t give it a second thought (they were too busy laughing at his intrusion and the by-plays that followed). That subtle unanswered dangling plot thread would become a lot more significant later on in the adventure!

Synopsis, Session 2 (from Session 3)

The team began to assess the impacts of the recent changes to their roster. The revelation that Blackwing’s armor had been corrupting him while sloughing any resistance, uncertainty, doubt, or hesitation off onto those nearby had profoundly impacted several members. In some cases, this had exacerbated existing psychological problems.

After taking the first steps to understand and come to terms with these influences, the team were summoned to Earth-Prime and a meeting with UNTIL that had been bathed in secrecy. Some of the biggest brass in the organization were present, but so far it wasn’t clear who was giving the briefing, and who was here to listen to it and decide what to do about it – a meeting that had just been crashed by the PCs superior officer in the Champions Organization, Backlash.

The most senior officer in the room, Brigadier-General Isobel Dimitrov, Head of the Command Section of the Operations Division, had just let slip that the content of the briefing could get everyone locked up in dark cells without keys if the wrong people found out about it.

St Barbara realized that all this “secrecy of identities” was for the purpose of protecting you from being identified by the Officers in the room. The UNTIL Officers all know each other, and you all know each other – and that meant that St Barbara had been correct when she characterized this mission as a top-secret Black Op – so much so, that UNTIL’s Field Commander was protecting her subordinates and peers from prosecution if it all went pear-shaped with some fairly extraordinary measures – including going completely outside the usual personnel pool for Agents to deal with the situation.

Colonel Courage then gave a brief background to the current political situation in what was now known as the USNA (United States Of North America). That country had withdrawn from the United Nations years before, and it was absolutely forbidden for UNTIL to even step foot on American Soil without permission from the American Government – but there were elections looming later in the year (in November as usual) and the two political parties that had emerged from the collapse of the Republican and Democratic Parties were both planning new policy directions, either of which would see the US emerge from its splendid isolation, eventually. The negotiations would stretch on for years when that started. He also revealed that there had been somewhat closer cooperation between the US UNTIL-Analogue, Thunder, and their own operations – strictly unofficially of course. For various reasons, the Americans were hyper-sensitive to political interference in their domestic affairs at the moment. It was even possible that the WiLL party, currently in the White House, would dis-endorse their own sitting President, so complicated and chaotic was the state of politics there at the moment. Worst case, they end up in a new Civil War, or in a war with the rest of the world. As a result, the official policy was to keep the US at arm’s length for the time being.

The South American Sub-Division’s commander, Colonel Martinez, then revealed that his division had learned that the WiLL party had fallen under the control of a House Of Demon, who were responsible for the change in political policy. That House of Demon had itself been infiltrated and were now dominated by skilled mages who had escaped to Earth-Prime in the course of Ragnarok and integrated themselves into the local society. The other political party, meanwhile had fallen under the control of a second House of Demon, one with more noble ethics and ambitions than the first, who were opportunists seeking personal power. Those were the ideologies who were about to clash, through veiled proxies, in the National Elections. Some of this, Team Zenith-3 already knew; some of it was news. They also had a level of wary respect and mild trust in one of the Houses of Demon, whose leader had rescued Knight from the Armor that had transformed him into Blackwing.

One of those Houses also controlled Central America, and now based itself in California; the other was New York based.

One of the many maps and diagrams created for this adventure, this shows the political ‘state of play’ in North, South, and Central America at the time – so far as PC-accessable intelligence sources knows, of course!

After a brief rest-break, the briefing resumed, this time with Martinez doing the talking. He expressed a preference for making sure Field Agents didn’t know everything as a means of keeping them on their toes and reacting to situations as they were rather than as command thought they were. So his briefing left a lot of information unsaid.

Mexico had fragmented into smaller nations in the social collapse of Ragnarok, and what social order emerged was at the behest of this House Of Demon, who had installed dictatorial regimes with selected puppet rulers selected from the local populations. They then dictated policies to these local front-men that have slowly been lifting the Central Americas out of Anarchy and toward more civilized behavior. The further north one goes in the region, the greater the influence that their big American Neighbor has had and the more civilized the Latin Countries become.

Brazil’s Fifth Reich had conquered many of its neighbors, whose governments had collapsed when The Great Poppy Plague had genetically altered the plants so that they no longer produced Opiates. So far, for a Nazi, Dr Muerte had proven to be a relatively benign, if ruthless, despot, who not only had a genuine concern for the welfare of his citizens, but had regard for his relations with the international community. Relations between the West-coast House Of Demon and the 5th Reich have also been surprisingly cordial, and the two have been working together to restore basic services and prosperity to the region. Muerte himself has become the most beloved figure in South America, and – significantly – the Reich has normalized relations with the Americans. He is everyone’s friend, at least at the moment.

UNTIL operatives normally sneak into the US via the 5th Reich, who have established a policy of ‘not noticing’ irregularities in paperwork and facilitating such transits. The Reich provides transit to Mexico and the Dictators then pass the agents toward the border as part of their cooperative attitude toward the Reich, and eventually smuggle the Agent across the Border.

With that information delivered, he wished the agents good fortune and left the room. Some of the lesser ranked officers had also made quiet exits.

The team took that to mean that the Agency was about to get down to the nitty-gritty, an impression reinforced by the fact that it was suddenly okay for identities to be revealed and introductions made. Brigadier Dimitrov again assumed the role of Ringmaster, which seemed to come naturally to her.

The functional nature of these introductions emphasized the operational nature of the meeting. Dimitrov was in charge of, and responsible for, everything that went on outside of Headquarters. Holder made sure that what UNTIL did was legal, especially when it wasn’t, and acted as a conscience for the organization. O’Kelly looked at what the others planned to do and what others were doing and advised on the repercussions – making him someone that even Dimitrov had to satisfy before a major mission could get underway. Smith knew more secrets than anyone else on the planet – in UNTIL’s estimation. Raid was in charge of the Champions from a global governmental perspective, and the Champions were in charge of their satellite programs like Zenith-3, making her the PCs boss. She actually regarded herself more as a Liaison, and was there because the Operational Personnel for the mission that was going to be proposed came from her Command. All of the above had to sign off on the Operation before it would be green-lit.

Wasser was the most gifted strategist in UNTIL and had planned the mission. Schwartz was there to provide technical support. And the team? They were there to carry out the mission – if it was green-lit, and if they accepted the responsibility.

Wasser informed the assembled group that a major incident was being prepared by a coalition of radical groups based in the American South who weren’t happy with the changes in policy that they were seeing. They are to make their move on the 4th of July. UNTIL had few other specifics at this time, but one of their operatives was presently in the US and would have more intelligence when the Operatives contacted him. All they knew at the moment was that whoever was behind it had connections with the Sons Of Liberty, who had connections with the Freedom Brigade, who had connections to the Rebel Tide.

A South African arms merchant by the name of Emil Zutzanger had sold Group X, the plotters, two stolen Russian nuclear warheads. His intelligence sources believed that they intended to detonate one or both as a political stunt and act of revolution in four days time. Worse still, through the Rebel Tide, UNTIL had become aware of several sympathizers within Thunder, so that organization could not be trusted to handle the situation. UNTIL’s second choice would be to work through the ex-Champions members known as the Crusaders, but the last time that they did so, they employed what UNTIL considers excessive force with an unacceptable loss of civilian lives; as a result, they are in internal turmoil and may even have splintered into two groups at war with each other. Their third choice would be to send in regular UNTIL agents – but the political situation in North America is too sensitive for that. UNTIL can’t be seen to be conducting an operation in the US at the moment. So their solution was to create a new set of identities for Zenith-3 and send them in to deal with this problem – and, having set them up, to maintain these covert roles until the North American situation stabilized politically with respect to the rest of the world.

UNTIL characterize the Zenith teams thus: Zenith-1 are good at finding things out, but are slow to get things done. Zenith-2 are good at blowing big holes in things, but slow to find the right things to blow up. Zenith-3 are somewhere in-between, without the failings of either.

So they proposed that Zenith-3 become – in addition to their other duties and assignments – a covert North American Field Branch of the Champions, capable of handling problems like this one, or rogue Crusaders, or anything else that might be beyond the capacity of Thunder to deal with.

That meant that they would have to be given new Superhero identities as well as new Civilian cover identities. Resources division, with Wasser’s assistance, had devised ways to camouflage the visual effects of their abilities.

The team can’t just teleport in, because the Demon House would detect that, and so might Thunder. Instead, they would have to go through the South-Central American channel like any other operatives and set up a Base Of Operations. In that, they could install equipment that would permit them to come and go covertly.

From time to time over the next year, when UNTIL need an operational force within the USNA, the team would be inserted back into their US cover identities, do whatever is necessary, and then exfiltrate to resume their normal lives and duties. Whether or not we need to continue the charade after that depends on the results of the elections there, something that we – and you – are not permitted to interfere with.

Officially, this Field Branch would be designated Team Shadow – what the members of Team Shadow decided to call their fictitious alliance of superheros in public was up to them.

Their followed a formal approvals process – one that flowed surprisingly quickly and seamlessly. The Legal department insisted on making it clear that membership in a subversive organization was not in itself necessarily an offense. The bottom line, expressed by Backlash (who could have vetoed the whole idea), was: “Operational Nuclear Weapons in the hands of radicals can’t be tolerated. Someone has to go in and get rid of the damn things, and I trust my people to do it in time more than I trust anyone else to do so.”

The final approval had to be St Barbara’s, but she got a commitment from each team member before giving it. And just like that, the process began of turning them into someone else.

The Political Officer listed a number of potential targets for Group X – ranging from Nuking the President on down to a demonstration and blackmail – but couldn’t give any indication of which one might be correct.

Captain Schwartz then led the team to his workshop and started throwing ideas at the team, in sequence from Easy to Hard.

He started by handing Knight a sketchpad of designs for him to choose a new appearance from. He chose a man made out of rocks, and the name Basalt.

He advised Defender that there were plenty of Kzin tourists roaming the US these days. Schwartz knew that the striped markings on his fur were clan markings, and asked if Defender was willing to change them; the answer was no, but he would forego wearing any while on this assignment. Schwartz then offered up a sort of ragged warrior look for him, and he chose the name Zantar.

Next was Karlos Green, whose best idea for a superhero identity so far had been “Mr Image” (Image being the organization he had previously worked for, the Earth-Regency equivalent of UNTIL in many respects). He was equipped with a standard UNTIL Force Field belt, a Force Utility Band – a blaster, in other words, designed to look like the beam was coming from the palm of his hand – and a union jack -based costume. This inspired the name, Union Jack, which he liked so much that he though he’d keep it.

Runeweaver was given a hat with a semi-invisibility generator that made him look semi-transparent, de-tuned so that parts of him in shadow would be fully invisible but the rest would not, and a head for his staff that created holographic glowing ‘spirits’, with a costume suggestive of a civil war officer and a mask, and a cloak that twists as though it had a mind of its own whenever magic was around, which he could deactivate if he wanted to. He chose the name Specter. It was suggested that he look for ways to make his spells look like ghostly powers.

St Barbara was given a comb that turned her hair raven-black or return it to blonde, a black outfit that covered her almost completely (unlike her usual choice of outfit), and finally, some contact lenses that shifted her perceptions of color into the ultraviolet. The absence of the usual colored sparkles that resulted made her energy blast look like a shadow leaping from her hand, accompanied by little bursts of light-devouring blackness that broke up the edges of her form. She became Nightshade, especially after Schwartz figured out how to use her flight to enhance her acrobatics surreptitiously. His piece-de-resistance was a disrupter that eliminated her distinctive personal force-field.

Vala was the team member who didn’t like what Schwartz had to offer. Any figure with wings would automatically remind the public of her true identity, as she had (without knowing about it) become one of the most recognizable people on the planet. She decided that she would simply use her powers to make people not notice her – and if that left her short-powered for doing other things, so be it.

Next, attention turned to the civilian identities that UNTIL had concocted:

• Knight: Frank Hudson, Manhunter
• Defender: Brust, tourist and inveterate explorer
• Mr Image: Roger Woodchild, Prospector
• Runeweaver: Isaiah Lucas, Ski Instructor and Competition Wood-logger
• St Barbara: Sue-Ellen Wilson, Talent Scout
• Vala: Carmen DeLambert (french name), Heiress, recovering from extensive plastic surgery performed in the South of France, and so swathed in bandages.

They certainly looked nothing like their usual selves when they were dressed in the appropriate outfits!

Finally, practical matters of finance were arranged; each team member was given a small amount of funds to carry; collectively, they would be enough to hire or buy a couple of cheap cars and other supplies, which they could use to search out a Base Of Operations. Once they had one selected, a phone call with the address and a local bank account number, and more money would be tracelessly wired in for the purchase and for equipping the facility.

They were given a precise rendezvous with the UNTIL officer who was, even then, gathering intelligence on the who and what of their mission. Using mechanical educators with many refinements and safeguards added over Behemoth’s original model, Spanish and German were then implanted in those who did not already speak the language, to two different standards – conversational fluency for some, and fluency to an expert level for others. Some final ‘good lucks’ and parting words, and the team were on their way – to another highly-secured building within the complex.

There, they learned that UNTIL had secretly copied the Champions Teleporter for point-to-point ultra-secure transits from UNTIL HQ to Permanent Bases within different nations – including Brazil.

Key Points & Notes

A huge info-dump, which I’ve largely just summarized here. There is some assumption that you know who the different entities are, but that’s not important enough to be worth the time explaining them. They have all changed so substantially from their original source material that they would be largely unrecognizable, anyway.

Take Demon, for example: a group of 13 groups of supervillain magi, a strictly-enforced meritocracy, there have been at least two major revolutions in their administration since their first appearance. Whatever you may have thought you knew about the organization is just their history.

The whole point of the briefing, then, is to remind the players (and tell readers) of the way things are, as opposed to the way things were.

Info-dumps are the most boring element of gaming. Every time one has to happen, I pull out absolutely everything in my bag of tricks to try and make them interesting.

I remember very well (and quite painfully) the lessons learned in the past, detailed in 2009 in My Biggest Mistakes: Information Overload in the Zenith-3 Campaign – but you can never avoid info-dumps completely. I’ve broken this one up with interruptions, and moments of humor, and interpersonal conversations, and putting personalities on display, and gaming visuals – maps for the most part, and anything else that I can think of.

One of those tricks is the mixture of old and new information – if players feel they already know something, they will tend to start ignoring it and engaging in side-chatter. Since it’s unrealistic to expect a briefing not to contain any old info, I permit a little more of that than I otherwise would (especially if it can be interpreted as being in-character side-chatter).

If you do it right, you can have your NPC interactions segue back from such side-chatter to signal the transition to new information or updates. Do this consistently, and players will eventually start to subconsciously cue off the trigger. That means that you can let verbal horseplay between players break up your larger info-dumps.

Another trick is to pass as much of the info-dump as your can to elsewhere in the adventure, passing the ‘responsibility’ for delivering that information to some other NPC.

The more information that you can pass in a two-way conversation, the better. That breaks up the info-dump with conversational phrases. In terms of this info-dump, there was certain information that the PCs needed in order for the players to base reasonable decisions on it; but anything they didn’t need to know until after their BOps was established was pushed off to the planned meeting in the “Rendezvous” section of Phase 5. And even then, I took a whole lot of background material and shoved it onto “reading the guidebook” en route to that rendezvous, and will punctuate that with visuals. There will be still more that I can offload to narrative accompanying specific locations that the PCs drive through en route. A casual contact at a gas station can let me sneak something extra out of the info-dump. And finally, the plan is for the Agent not to have all the answers – just places to look for more answers. That makes acquiring a large chunk of the prospective info-dump, an interactive process of investigation by the PCs.

Put all that together, and this was a successful info-dump that kept the players engaged and interested. Compared to some (like the example linked to earlier), it was even better than that!

Something else to note is that some of the new identities were expected to be accepted, some were for NPCs (but it was reasonable that they would also accept them), and there were some that were more problematic, or even expected to be rejected.

That was – in part – where the revelations from the very first part of the adventure made a difference. In particular, the psychology of Knight – the former Blackwing – was critical; this was a character that had just reclaimed his humanity, it was rather unlikely without the prompting from the Spirit Walk that the player would have thought that the character would have accepted the new identity of Basalt, for example.

Synopsis, Session 3 (from Session 4)

Zenith-3 have been recruited into Team Shadow, a covert branch of the Champions to operate behind the lines of North America every now and then – starting now, because Domestic Terrorists have bought two stolen Russian nuclear weapons are believed to intend to use them on the Fourth of July, somewhere in the US of North America. Political sensitivity and the fact that they have no legal authority there mean that UNTIL cannot be seen to mount operations there, so the plan was for the team to infiltrate America via Central America and Mexico, guided by a contact of a House Of Demon that would be arranged through the Government of the 5th Reich.

To keep their true superhero identities a secret and avoid diplomatic entanglements, new identities both civilian and paranormal had been crafted for each member.

Before they knew it, in their new civilian guises, the team were teleported to Base Fortaleza in Brazil, where they were met by Agent Indigo, a dark-haired Hispanic woman in a very angry frame of mind over the inconvenience of arranging a last-minute meeting with Senior Government Official late at night on a Monday without advance warning. She demanded to know what was so urgent that it couldn’t wait until morning.

So the team told her part of the story – stolen nukes and someone intending to use them – which calmed her down somewhat. This was the first indication that things were just a little different to what they had expected, here in South America.

She gave them temporary visas assigning them Protected Diplomatic Status, giving them the protection of the Reich and encouraging cooperation from any official who might be encountered, then led them out into the street. The city was not at all what they expected, it was bright, shiny, and modern.

As soon as they left the UNTIL Field headquarters, some of the team noticed that they had picked up a Shadow. A man in suit and tie with glasses and a cocked hat, who occasionally mopped his brow with a red silken handkerchief, but otherwise pretended to be inconspicuous without trying too hard. Agent Indigo told them that the spies for the various agencies all knew who one another were, and so followed each other around. Because the group were strangers to him, he was naturally interested in their identities; there were few secrets on the streets of Fortaleza. If he wasn’t thrown off the scent, he would follow them all the way to their meeting at the central command and might even blow their cover. To do this, she took them over and introduced him as “Comrade Osselzlekzy of the KGB Central Intellat, Division 9, who was stationed there because no government in the world really trusted Fuhrer Muerte but no-one has so far been able to catch him out.

They quickly realized that the spy subculture went even further than this impression; they socialized, attending the same functions, sometimes cooperated and sometimes interfered with each other, and generally treated it like a fairly cordial game. Agent Indigo gave him a code-phrase to take back to his superiors that he obviously recognized after he announced that he knew of their late-night appointment already; “Hard Rain Umbrella” meant nothing to the team, but it caused the KGB man to shudder despite the heat and wish them all “Very, Very good luck”, which suggested that she may have even told him something like “Rogue nukes”.

But the encounter had cost the team time, so they had to take a “Putt-putt”, a small two-cylinder three wheeled van with seating for a half-dozen people, the most common form of transport in Fortaleza, and a short-cut. That in turn required them to walk down an alley in which, they were warned, they might see, hear, or smell distressing things; she warned them not to be too quick to judgment.

The alleyway led directly into what could only be considered a slum of the destitute, families living in squalor and misery. Agent Indigo explained that Muerte, to his credit, had tried giving them homes in clean, serviced apartments that were big enough for their families, but the locals expected it to be taken away from them on a whim, and so didn’t value the accommodations or maintain them. Soon, they start to look like what the team saw around them.

The Reich, to their credit, seemed to have found a solution to the social problem of slums that was starting to make inroads into the problem, a combination of socialism and fascism that she detested but that at least created the opportunity for upward social mobility. Once, hundreds of thousands had lived in squalor like this in the Capital; now there are that same number spread all over the Reich, the 3% on the bottom rung of the society. The rest had managed to bootstrap their way into a growing middle class.

As they walked, twisting and turning through several of the narrow corridors between buildings, she continued to describe the society that had been erected in the South American nation. Eventually, the group reached a “proper” alleyway; between them and its mouth were five men and a woman of rough looking people, ranging in age from late teens to late fifties, carrying various weapons. Agent Indigo told the team not to panic, just make sure that their rank buttons were showing, and advanced half-way to the group. She then stepped forward and announced loudly that she was about to turn around and walk back to the people she was escorting, who out-ranked her; anyone looking for a confrontation with the Reichsmarshall should still be there when she turned back around. She then turned her back on the thugs who looked at each other, startled, and then bolted like startled rabbits.

Past the entrance lay one of the major tourist thoroughfares; the group had no trouble hailing a couple of putt-putts. Agent Indigo gave the driver of the lead vehicle directions; he abruptly turned white, vacated his seat and brushed down the plastic-covered passenger seats. You would guess that Indigo had impressed upon him the VIP nature of her ‘guests’. The driver of the second putt-putt, observing this reaction, did likewise before, unsatisfied, ripped off the seat covers and dumped them in a waste-bin on the side of the road.

One road flowed smoothly into another as the putt-putts exerted their full 75 horsepower; the drivers proved adept at judging how fast they had to travel in order to avoid being stopped by traffic lights. Ten minutes later, they pulled into an otherwise empty boulevard. Indigo waved her rank badge at a checkpoint manned by an armed soldier, who saluted her. The putt-putt slowed to something less than a walking pace as you drove around a gardened area until a large building became visible, then slowed even more so that you could get a good view.

Indigo shouted over the noise of the engine, “The Palace Of Reichenfuhrer Muerte. Few get to see it so closely, fewer still to tell others of what they have seen. But you have the authority and it was on our way, so…” Glancing at her watch – one of those newfangled digital devices being sold by the Koreans, she gestured to the drivers, who immediately got underway.

Another ten minutes conveyed the group to a black building bathed in green spotlights with a three-story-tall Reich flag fluttering atop an enormous flagpole. After rating the job performed by each of their drivers, the team were escorted by Indigo into the Central Command of the 5th Reich.

The interior of the building was all red and gold and dark wooden paneling. Despite the warm colors, there was something clinical about the execution of the building – a pattern that seemed to apply to a lot of other features of the society, now that the team thought about it. The receptionist soon proved to be someone else charmed by Agent Indigo, who seemed perfectly suited to this social environment, at once disciplined and exuberant. When asked whom they wished to see – most general staff having left for the day many hours earlier – Indigo advised that they had an appointment with Oberster Fuhrer der Schutzstaffel ReichMuerte.

This name brought the flirting between the two to an immediate end as the reception officer, “Franz”, was suddenly all business. Passing through metal detectors and saluting guards, the group were directed to Room 1101.

The ‘Interview’ with Oskar Von Peirera, Doctor Muerte’s Oberster Fuhrer der Schutzstaffel ReichMuerte (Chief Of Intelligence), consisted of equal parts polite chitchat, canapes, wine, and banter with Indigo. Eventually, he asked a serious question about the mission. Indigo then began to work hard at convincing him that it would be of great importance to the Reich, and that at its end, he would want to have done everything in his power to ensure its success.

Evidently, she did not give her word to him very often, because he accepted the assurance, socialized a little more, and then wished the team good luck and whisked them on their way.

When they reached the ground floor, the guards were all carefully looking the other way so as not to see them depart, and the receptionist was nowhere to be seen. Exiting the building, they saw three black limousines waiting at the curb; choosing the middle one, as instructed, they noticed that the identical vehicle ahead and the one behind appeared to carry close doubles of each team member, including a Kzin in tourist get-up.

The convoy raced through the streets, one vehicle almost on the bumper of the one ahead of it; traffic signals mysteriously changed as the convoy approached, so they were never delayed. Other traffic made a point of getting out of their way. At a four-way intersection, the three identical vehicles split up, each exiting in a different direction; the one containing the team made a high-speed transit through a hotel’s underground car park and then a slow-speed transit through a car wash, which stripped away the black coloration and revealed the white paint and gold logos of a hotel shuttle service.

At a completely normal pace, the vehicle then conveyed the group to the Airfield and pulled up right at the entrance of a black-painted light aircraft, which they quickly boarded. The aircraft then took off without running lights; once in the air, the struts dropped away and the wings folded back into a delta-wing configuration, a small explosive charge shed the propeller, turning it into chaff, and revealing a hidden Magnetic Pulse engine; the aircraft accelerated smoothly to Mach 1.2.

The group were impressed by the level of organization needed to pull all this off at short notice; until they had walked through the front doors, the Nazis would have had no idea of genders or appearance, let along that they numbered a Kzin amongst them.

Two hours and 45 minutes later, the aircraft touched down in Maracaibo, Venezuela – which, the pilot warned, was in a different time zone to Fortaleza. The local time was 1 AM, and the team were officially tumbling down the rabbit-hole….

Key Points & Notes

My conceptual touchstone for the entire Fifth Reich was that nothing was exactly what it seemed to be on the surface, which is why every spy wore what they really were on their sleeves – for the contrast. It also made sense in a reverse-psychological way – if someone in such an environment looked like a spy, then “a spy” is probably what they weren’t.

The slums were another example of this, borrowing from some of the public housing history of native Australian populations.

There was a logical discrepancy between an intelligent and creative man – no matter how villainous – and such an obvious social throwback as a “Fifth Reich”. I therefore decided that his villainy was the result of his means of achieving ends that he thought justified – which is that the government function rationally, by force if necessary. This was such a contrast with the usual anarchy of South and Central America, that it could be argued that strict and militant applications of force were the only means of rehabilitating the culture. It probably didn’t help that the cartels which had propped up several of the governments had collapsed after intervention by another PC in an earlier phase of the campaign to eliminate the “narcotics problem”, and that this was followed by the global catastrophe of Ragnarok. These lines of thought led to the policies of the Fifth Reich, which were also intended to touch on another theme of the adventure – the value to be placed on liberty when it is self-destructive.

There are those who will read connections to the current global Pandemic into that theme, but these notions went onto paper long before I’d ever heard of SARS-Cov-2. The current situation in the US is just an ironic counterpoint. Where the PCs, who hold liberty in extremely high regard, come down on the issues raised was intended to be just another in a long line of such moral quandaries that they have encountered.

It took something that the PCs had always viewed as black-and-white and mixed a substantial amount of gray into both sides. Now, the PCs were able to take a pragmatic view, and ignore the broader questions this all raised for the most part – but the final Mission won’t give them that luxury, as they encounter a situation in which others have the same basic black-and-white philosophy that the PCs have espoused, and use it to justify things that the PCs find unacceptable – forcing the PCs to be the ones mixing in the gray, and broadening their horizons of what was acceptable.

The whole “Fifth Reich” concept should NOT be interpreted as a support or justification for Fascism. My personal opinion is that it’s a bad political system that crushes and oppresses, and I’ve seen nothing in the last 10 years or more to change that judgment. But the only acceptable answer to questions like “Should Axe Murderers be denied their Liberty?” leads inexorably to the conclusion that in some cases, society can benefit from the removal of individual liberty. The argument then is about where you draw the line, and about safeguards, and other real-world consequences.

In fact, a previous adventure was deliberately placed so as to make Muerte a villain of the blackest sort, and it remains just as valid in this continuity. For every Schindler, there’s a – well, take your choice, there are no end of options!

As stated elsewhere, another factor is that I wanted this part of the adventure to be more of a lighthearted romp, after the heaviness and ponderous tones of the “Briefing”, and despite not being able to lampoon the Fascists for the plot reasons described, I think that it succeeds. This is a society that’s on its way to transforming from Fascism to something else; at this point, they still have some fascist trappings, but the change is clearly underway.

And that’s where I’m drawing the line under part one. Parts two and three will follow as soon as I can get them finished. That’s right, I’m changing things up in recognition of this being my 1001st post – a little flexibility will give me cover to clean up some of the loose ends that I have let accumulate over the last 11-12 years. My original intent was to use the Thursday article slot in this fashion, but weakening health has made it impossible to get enough productive hours a week for that.

1000 posts: a personal milestone

So. 1000 posts. Four figures.

That’s no small achievement. It’s something to be proud of.

I’ve been casting about for suggestions on how to commemorate this milestone for the last few months, but the few suggestions I’ve received haven’t really been all that helpful – “Something reflective”, “Something forward-looking”, “Something quintessentially Campaign Mastery”.

Two or weeks before this words were first crafted, I came up with the notion of talking about campaign milestones, what they mean, and how achieving one transforms that campaign moving forward.

That ticks all of those boxes – reflective? Check.

Forward-looking? Check.

Quintessentially Campaign Mastery? Check number three.

I briefly contemplated a second part to this article, and that soon necessitated a third part to put the second part into context, and that started to get too big and complicated, and looked like it would overwhelm the first part – so that’s all be excerpted into an article for a week or two from now. That’s very Campaign Mastery, too!

What remains is still very large – twice the size of the usual Campaign Mastery post, and they are already plenty long – and that’s only appropriate for such a landmark article (I’ve admitted the blindingly obvious before – I don’t do “small” very well)!

As some of you may know, Sydney has just come out of 108 days of Lockdown due to Covid-19. Yesterday, face-to-face gaming resumed after almost three months absence. Next week, my superhero campaign should restart, and the week after, Dr Who, and the week after that, the Adventurer’s Club Pulp campaign. After the famine, a feast – at least until Christmas shuts everything down for about a month.

So this is a celebration of sorts – let’s get this party started!

Campaign Creation

I’ve divided the life of a campaign into five main stages. To some extent, the milestones within each stage are interchangeable in terms of sequence.

The first stage is, as you can see, Campaign Creation. Yes, you can create a campaign with none of these six milestones – but that campaign would be lacking any meaningful sense of cohesion. These are what essentially defines a campaign, and gives that campaign it’s uniqueness.

0. The Unscratched Itch

All campaigns start with an unscratched itch. It might be a hankering to get behind the GM Screen (which may actually be a metaphoric construct); it could be a desire to run a certain type or style of game; it’s possible that it’s the desire to run a campaign of a certain genre, or with a certain rules system; it can even be the desire to do something different from what you’ve done before, or curiosity about how a certain concept would play out.

I’ve played in, or GM’d, campaigns that fit each of these descriptions, and a few more besides. Like the time a discussion about chase game-mechanics led to the creation of a short-lived (3 game sessions) Wacky Races campaign with completely original rules – all of which fitted on a single page with room for the sense of whimsy and caprice to find expression.

It doesn’t matter what the specifics are. What matters is that this gives the GM his personal motivation for creating and running the campaign.

Without that motivation, the GM is running the campaign because someone has to, not because he (or she) particularly wants to. The result is that everything that he has to do to get the campaign ready will feel like work to a greater or lesser extent, and he only has his sense of responsibility to carry him through it.

Unless he can discover the fun to be had, his effort and enthusiasm will be increasingly compromised as the work progresses. I’ve seen GMs that have burned out without a single die being rolled – arguably, they should never have accepted the task in the first place.

There are ways of structuring the group dynamic so that there is less pressure on such GMs. A round-robbin arrangement, for example, means that the GM isn’t under as much time pressure to have a game ready to run, because there’s something else to fill the void.

Or you could decide to have a ‘board games day’ until the new campaign is ready to run.

There are numerous alternatives open to you if you need them. These possibilities only scratch the surface.

1. Campaign Concept

The first real milestone comes when the GM has an idea for a campaign. He or she might not have all the details worked out yet, the idea might be vague and undefined, but he now has a direction.

This gives the GM an answer to the question of what will scratch the itch. It begins to shape and restrict the nigh-infinite possibilities to fit the GM’s motivation, rendering it in a concrete proposal.

It also provides the key premises of the campaign, enabling further development to begin. Without it, a campaign might as well be constructed using random tables because it will have the same degree of unity and depth as one generated in that fashion.

2. Campaign Overview

You can’t really have an overview until you have a campaign concept, because this is a general statement of the direction the campaign is going to go, some notion of the overall storyline that will define the start and end-points of the campaign.

The creation of a campaign overview tends to bring into sharper focus any vagueness about the campaign concept.

This is as much about how adventures will be structured in relation to the broader campaign as it is about anything else. For example, you might decide that the adventures will be mostly standalone (episodic continuity) but that each will start with a briefing which relates the adventure to a broader picture, giving it context and continuity within that broader setting.

Or game sessions might be fully self-contained, to the point where NPCs will forget all interactions with the PCs from one adventure to the next. Or whatever.

3. Campaign Setting

This might be developed before the Campaign Overview; or in parallel with it. The Campaign Setting contains everything the GM needs to know about the environment and society against which the campaign will be set. While it may be specific, it should not contain specifics – but it probably does.

The Campaign Setting confines and narrows the adventures that will be possible. If an adventure is to take place despite this restriction, additional adventures may be needed to kick the campaign into an appropriate shape.

4. Campaign Background

The campaign background is impossible to write completely until the Campaign Setting and Campaign Overview are done, because it will tell prospective players what the need to know in order to generate PCs. It doesn’t include game or character mechanics; it’s conceptual in nature.

5. Campaign Briefing

The Campaign Briefing contains any game mechanics necessary to implement the Campaign Overview within the Campaign Setting that the players need to know before generating PCs.

Once all this has been done, you have a campaign – it’s just not ready to play yet.

Campaign Prep

The Campaign Creation phase starts vague and nebulous and gradually becomes specific in relation to what PCs know or need to know. The Campaign Prep phase starts getting specific on the GM side of the fence.

Once again, there are six milestones that fall within this phase of campaign creation.

6. Key NPCs

You don’t need specifics like character classes and levels and key possessions at this point, but you do need a sense of who they are, their personalities, and how they fit into the scheme of things. The first hints of these details will be found in the Campaign Setting and Background, and it’s not uncommon for this milestone to come into view (i.e. for work to start) before those milestones are complete. However, this milestone can’t actually be reached (i.e, key NPCs created) until those milestones are achieved. This milestone is achieved when you have a sense of who the “players” in the campaign social and political landscape are going to be.

Although it’s not strictly required at this point, I make an effort to name the key players just so that I have a reference point to distinguish one from another. Those are always subject to change (or, more frequently, to translation); I might name a character Sage Revenant in these rough notes and later decide that he’s an Elf and so rename him according to the naming conventions assigned to the Elvish race. “La Serge, Depateur Shade” sounds credible, doesn’t it?

I’m particularly in favor of names that add to the personality color of the character, that can create expectations just from the way they sound. Unless I want the character to be a colorless cut-out, of course – but it’s exceptionally rare to need someone meeting that description at this point in the process.

7. Campaign Planning

The final thing that you need to do is a rough breakdown of the Campaign Overview. These are akin to “director’s notes” for the forthcoming “season” of a TV show – For example, “Things start warm and friendly (but adventurous) and slowly become darker and grimmer. Rumors start circulating of conspiracies in high places, perhaps even Treason. Characters start having enemies appear who know more than they should. Important people start to drop out of sight or disappear, replaced by “temporary appointees” or “acting” officials. All this comes into sharp focus when one of the PCs is made such an appointee and learns that the situation is even worse than is publicly appreciated. Other PCs have to protect the ‘appointed’ one, stop a couple of attacks on him, and get a clue to the identity of the mysterious puppeteer behind events, which they pursue until it leads to the final confrontation.”

Six adventures would make this feel a little rushed, ten would feel about right, more than twelve and events might develop too slowly for the players to really notice.

With this done, you will have a sense of what each adventure will be like, and how many of them there will be within the campaign.

8. Campaign Prep Complete

At some point, all seven of the preceding milestones will have been ticked off, and that brings the GM to an all-important eighth milestone: he feels ready to actually start the playing cycle of generating adventures and running them. Everything prior to this has been one-off, it only has to be done once for a campaign; those things that have to be done repeatedly, for every game session, still lie ahead of him.

The word “complete” is a little misleading, in the title – campaign prep is never complete, it’s just “complete enough” to be fit for purpose. Most GMs are adding to campaign canon – background, important NPCs, splashes of color here and there – right up to the last game session of the last adventure (some times more than others, to be fair). It’s also likely that all the other documentation has continued to evolve, gaining detail and nuance and clarity, as campaign prep has been underway. It’s time to lock most of that documentation down, and a confidence in doing so is another important trigger for the achievement of this milestone.

Of course, there’s one ingredient that may be missing: warm bodies. Time to rectify that (if the GM hasn’t done so already).

9. Invitations To Game

“I’ve got a new campaign, I think you’d have fun playing in it, would you like to join?”
— I’ll think about it–
“Great, I’ll shoot you off a copy of the player briefing materials and campaign background. Get back to me if there are any problems.”
— Yeah, whatever, dude.–

This is an important milestone, achieved when everyone that you want to invite has been invited.

Circumstances are going to be different for every gaming group – it could be as simple as an announcement to an already existing group, “next week we’ll be starting my new campaign, here’s what you need to know” – or it could be as complicated as synchronizing schedules with someone living and working in a different state or city. There will almost always be one player who (unexpectedly) joins the campaign or (unexpectedly) begs off.

I have known GMs who took six months to go from a campaign being “ready to play” to having enough self-confidence to actually offer it up for play. In fact, I know one person who has generated multiple campaigns but never had the confidence to take them public.

This is an important milestone because it represents the GM putting his work on public display.

10. The First Acceptance

This milestone may take place seconds, minutes, days, or even weeks later. I came up with the first draft of Fumanor five years before this milestone was reached – the first group of players to which it was offered were not interested, either because of the game system, or because they were in several of my other campaigns already, or didn’t like the sound of it, or the moon was the wrong variety of cheese, or whatever. That was fine, I created and ran a TORG campaign instead – with several of the players who had turned Fumanor down. Years later, a new crop of players has joined the group, and there’s a vacant slot in the timetable, so I offered Fumanor up again – enough of them accepted that it was off and running.

The first acceptance is usually a lot more eager than the rather lackluster response offered in the exchange described earlier, which was indifferent at best. Any GM having that conversation would consider that player, at best, a fifty-fifty chance of signing up. The more eager a player is, the more likely it is that the campaign will actually take place, so it’s a vindication of the work that the GM has put into creating it. What’s more, enthusiasm tends to be contagious – one eager player is likely to actively recruit more (even people that you’ve never met before).

11. Ready To Go

Most GMs will have a threshold in mind, a minimum number of sign-ups needed before the campaign will be officially “go”. Some campaigns that I run were designed for one player, some for two (specific individuals in all cases), some for a minimum of three (but that have been run with two in the past for long periods), and some for more. Fumanor needed at least 4 initially, and two giving an ongoing commitment.

Sometimes, there will be too much interest; most GMs will have some idea of the maximum number of players that they can accommodate simultaneously as a GM. My limit is 6, and I prefer a ceiling of 5. My superhero campaign has four players at the moment, and it’s a comfortable number. Adventurer’s Club Pulp currently has 5, but has had seven or eight at times in the past – that was manageable with two GMs to share the workload, but there wasn’t really enough spotlight to go around that many players. If we were able to play more frequently, it might have been doable. But one regular dropped out to study at university, one dropped out because an opportunity came up to play something that he was more interested in, I switched from player to co-GM, and that brought us down to five.

If oversubscribed, you may need to run a ‘reserves’ list or a ‘waiting list’. At it’s height, my superhero campaign had nine players and a waiting list with 21 names on it. Too many players, really, but things were heading for an epic plotline so I felt justified in permitting an epic number of players. If you can tolerate such numbers, over time, one of two things happens: the numbers scale themselves back to something more manageable, or you learn how to cope well refereeing a zoo.

You can’t say know to someone who wants to spend a couple of hours traveling just to be in your game.

As soon as the number of players reaches the critical threshold, but doesn’t exceed the maximum, this milestone is achieved, and the campaign takes on a life of its own.

Campaign Reality

Generate adventure and trappings, play adventure, rinse, repeat. Again, and again, and again. That’s what the GM has signed up for when his campaign becomes “real”.

That’s not to say that there aren’t significant milestones along the way – there are. In fact, I’ve listed five milestones that range from near-certainty to absolute inevitability. The actual sequence in which they are experienced is extremely variable.

This is also the period when the GM has to get used to the requirements of GMing this particular campaign. Every campaign is a little different in terms of the prep-time required – some greater, some less, some with more ongoing effort shoehorned into the campaign prep and some with more ongoing needs. The GM may need to evolve his methods of performing game prep, or rearrange his schedule. There’s an ongoing evolution-and-response in techniques and attitudes that is occurring throughout this period. Sometimes, I recommend that GMs allow an extra 20% prep time in this phase simply because less of it will be second-nature to him or her and the methodology will not yet be really efficient.

12. The First Adventure Begins

There’s no doubt that this is a significant milestone in any campaign. It’s almost inevitable that at the end of it, the GM will feel that his prep was inadequate, or focused on the wrong things. It’s a near-certainty that at some point, the GM will have had to scramble to cover something that he hadn’t realized he needed to prep for, usually a PC doing something he didn’t expect, but perhaps should have. The better the GM knows the players and their default style, the less likely this is to occur – down to about a 50-50 chance of it not happening with respect to any particular player, at best.

This is also the GMs first experience at GMing these particular PCs and there are a multitude of lessons to be learned from that experience, too. Hopefully, he has managed things well enough to have a variety of characters (though I did once dream up a campaign for 4-5 players, all operating rogues – but with different sub-classes – so they were all the same but different). As he grows to know them better, the GM has to become adept at giving each character his moment in the spotlight, and start generating adventures that derive purely from character backstories – in the process, integrating the players’ creations into the game world and causing the campaign to evolve in consequence.

And finally, this is the players’ first attempt at becoming a cohesive unit. It’s exceptionally rare for this to ‘click’ on a first attempt – I’ve seen it take up to a year of monthly play. Usually, three or four game sessions starts to create a ‘party dynamic’ and the group begins to meld together to become more than the sum of its parts.

So this milestone signals a slight shift in the focus of the GM; from this point onwards, he’s not dealing with some abstract fancy, he’s dealing with the real and practical problems of an ongoing campaign. A shift in mindset is not only required, it’s essential.

This always reminds me of why Australian engineers were always popular hires for motor-racing teams through the sixties and seventies, and into the eighties. If they didn’t have something, they made it; if they couldn’t make it, they bodged something together to replace it (that often worked better than the original part) – at least, that was their reputation. This was a modern-day reflection of the legendary “bush mechanics” of days past; when the nearest spare parts are 300 miles or more away (and the internet hasn’t been invented yet), you either make it yourself or learn to do without. It might take fifty or a hundred tries (but it usually won’t) before you get it right, but you can usually come up with something “good enough” far more quickly. The more thoroughly you understand the operating principles and basic engineering, the shorter the path between need and solution. It was that ‘can-do’ attitude, combined with sufficient competence to get the job done, that the motorsport teams were enamored of.

And it’s that attitude and approach that the GM now needs to bring to the table; he can no longer afford to take weeks to fiddle with details until he has everything ‘just so’, he needs to get into the mindset of determining what is going to be ‘good enough’ and then moving on to the next problem. If he has spare time at the end, he can go back and refine his ‘good enough’ solutions to make them ‘even better’. It’s this basic process that I outlined in Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity and further defined in To Every Creator, An Optimum Budget?

In a nutshell: The relative value of game prep is the time required to generate it to a suitable standard multiplied by the likelihood that it will be used. These relative values let you subdivide your prep time for optimum results. You don’t actually have to calculate the values, you can do it all in your head using instinct and experience. The reality is not quite so simple, of course, for various reasons – prep isn’t all or nothing, and some prep has residual value (a gift to the campaign that keeps on giving), both of which complicate this nice, simple, prioritization, but the general principle applies. The rule of thumb is that you prioritize the different parts of getting your game prep to a bare minimum standard. When everything is at that level, you can devote any remaining prep time to improving specific parts of your prep to a higher standard, based on the amount of reward you will get for the effort. This will differ from one GM to the next, because everyone has their strong points and weak points, and expending more prep on areas in which you are weak gives a better return on ‘invested time’ than spending prep time on something that you do well without a lot of prep.

So the GM’s priorities and thinking have to change when this milestone is achieved. In fact, they will change, whether the GM likes it or not.

13. Thinking In Character

The second milestone in this phase of the campaign life-cycle occurs when a player starts thinking in character for the first time, that is to say, becomes so comfortable stepping into their character’s shoes that they do so naturally and without effort.

Suddenly, there is a new filter over their perceptions of characters, and events, and dangers, and rewards, and relationships. The character has ‘gelled’ into a specific individual within their mind.

That creates a new imperative for the GM: his planning has been built around (at best) an approximation of what the character would be like, and needs to be updated to match the new reality. What’s more, the character becomes more predictable in broad terms, provided that the GM can penetrate the player’s mind and understand the character. That takes a lot of doing, and sometimes is never complete, but every approximation brings the GM closer to writing for the character, and not to a generalized abstraction of the character.

The better the GM understands this manifested personality, the better his adventures will be, and the better his NPCs interactions with the PC will be, and the better he will be able to run the character if the player can’t make it for some reason – so there are a whole host of benefits to achieving that understanding.

If the GM is doing his job right, this will represent a shift in his thinking and a subtle shift in his priorities – he no longer needs to devote as much time to understanding that character.

14. The First Surprise

Inevitably, at some point, the GM will be surprised by a character development or desire. This milestone tells the GM that the campaign has now taken on a life of its own, and is growing in unexpected directions. From this point on, the GM can take less for granted; characters may no longer operate in the most logical way, but will respond with a rationale deriving from their personalities and perceptions of events.

It’s questionable whether or not this milestone will occur before or after the 13th mile-marker described above; a surprise can occur because the player is still groping with an integrated personality for the PC or sense of their capabilities and ‘go to’ preferences, or it can happen because the player has achieved that personality integration and the GM is still trying to get a handle on it.

From this point onward, the GM has to at least consider unlikely choices on the part of the characters, causing some prep to be both necessary and wasted. That means that the GM has less luxury for detailed prep and needs to more closely plan his prep activities.

15. Character Unity

This milestone represents the characters working as a unit for the first time, making plans based around each other’s capabilities and personalities. Some players never reach this point; others seem reluctant to step into such a leadership role, perhaps fearing that they will steal too much of the spotlight from the other PCs, or that the GM will react to such a possibility by diminishing the amount of spotlight that they are actually getting. Others wear it uncomfortably, but are successful at it; and a few excel at it.

The team leader in the Zenith-3 campaign, Blair, is one of those for whom this doesn’t come naturally (in his own words, his character didn’t un-volunteer quickly enough and had leadership thrust upon her). As part of the current plotline, she has relinquished command in favor of another PC, whose player is more of a natural in the leadership role, but who has been more reluctant to take on that responsibility, creating an interesting dynamic within the PCs relationships.

At the same time, the role of field commander (who makes the strategic and not the policy decisions) has also been transferred from a PC (whose player wasn’t great at it, but who tried hard) to an NPC, creating a fresh challenge for me as GM: I have to be careful to separate GM knowledge from character knowledge, and avoid making the character’s decisions right all the time – but, at the same time, have to maintain his hard-earned reputation for insights and out-of-the-box synergistic thinking. I don’t want the PCs doing things the way this character suggests because the GM is suggesting them through this NPCs voice; I want them doing things that way because the NPC is right more often than he’s wrong, and has a tactical instinct and training.

At the same time, the two structures exist in parallel – any decisions that have a potential impact beyond a specific scope have to be referred back to the main commander, so she doesn’t get to take a complete holiday from the responsibilities of command. The practical upshot is that the really difficult policy problems land back at the original leader’s feet.

In general terms, this milestone represents a significant increase in the capability levels of the PCs. It’s a signal to the GM that he needs to step up to the plate with more substantial and interesting challenges, because the old ones will become too easy. At the same time, there needs to be a few of ‘the old standard’ just so that the players get a sense of how far their characters have come.

This milestone is a key indicator that the campaign is graduating from its beginning period into maturity.

16. The First Spotlight

But there’s one more milestone to go before that transition is complete: an adventure that derives completely from the intersection between PC persona as expressed in play and the campaign background. In other words, a spotlight session that derives from the way a character is actually being played, and not from their abilities or backstory. This can only precede milestone 14 through blind luck, because there is no focal characterization prior to that milestone; but it can easily slot in between milestone 14 and milestone 15.

This is an important step in the campaign’s life cycle because it signals to the players that the GM is modifying the campaign in response to player input – their characters are making a difference, in other words. Ideally, this adventure will be prepared and produced to the same standard as the usual, and, in fact- aside from the meta-game perspective of the players – should be indistinguishable from one of the GM’s own adventures.

This milestone acknowledges that the players are (at the very least) shareholders in the campaign (perhaps with a smaller share than the GM, depending on the campaign specifics) and may even be full co-owners. This is a significant relinquishing of total control by the GM, however tenuous his loosening of the reigns might appear, representing (and requiring) yet another evolutionary step in the way that he thinks about the campaign.

When both this milestone and the 15th milestone are achieved, the campaign can be considered a mature one, in which the GM furnishes winds and waves but the players steer the ship.

The Mature Campaign

In the mature campaign, a number of changes take place. More than any other stage of the campaign life-cycle, these can occur in any sequence. Some may even predate the achievement of ‘mature’ status, that’s how variable they are in timing and sequence. Some may never occur in a given campaign – but the longer the campaign lasts, the more inevitable they become.

A critical change that occurs at some point in this campaign phase is that it transitions from an unstable, semi-chaotic state to a predictable, regular, stable event. That, of course, is recognized by one of the milestones below, because it marks a dividing line in the campaign in many respects.

17. The First Revision

To a very large extent, up to the point of this milestone, the GM has been able to operate using his initial campaign-prep documentation, adding to it as necessary. This milestone occurs when, for the first time, he or she has to deliberately revise something that was previously canon.

This is fraught with danger and difficulty, because the players will have used “what was” as a driver of their decision-making. If the GM can orchestrate the change such that there is no retrospective change in PC knowledge, delivering a campaign-significant plot twist and accompanying revelation to the PCs about the nature of some element of the game world, there’s usually no problem, provided that the campaign history can be made compatible with the new reality; the presumption is that it was always this way, the inhabitants of the game world (including the PCs) simply didn’t know it before.

My Shards Of Divinity campaign took place before the separation of Elves into Drow and Non-Drow. This altered the racial profile of Elves significantly. Their first dungeon turned out to be a prison in which the nigh-immortal Prince who had been seduced by Lolth was held captive and powerless. Before his incarceration in magical suspension, he had been creating hidden camps of his adherents in various places – think terrorist training camps, some underground in the literal sense, most underground in the sense of them being secret. One of his followers, an Aquatic Elf, was infatuated with the Prince, to whom she had been betrothed; she had grown jealous (and suspicious) of Lolth and had betrayed the Princes’ dalliance to the Elvish King, who had directed his mages to create the prison and force his rebellious son into it. What he did not realize was that there were Drow Adherents amongst those mages, who modified the spell cast on the Prince so that all Drow Loyalists would also be cast into stasis by the Great Spell – to abide, hidden in their lairs, until their Prince reawakened. The PCs learned all of this only after accidentally re-awakening said Prince. Even the word, “Drow” meant ‘Secret’ in the Elvish Language, or possibly “Subversive”, or “Stealthy”. The word had been banned after the Great Schism.

This forced the PCs to re-evaluate everything they knew about Elves and about the Drow revolution. They now saw a continuity of personalities with the most fanatical at one extreme and the most liberal at the other; the spell had affected everyone past a specific cut-off mark but that had been generations ago, more than enough time for a few dissident voices to grow into a new Drow undercurrent, who had stealthily manipulated events to send the PCs on the particular quest by putting information about the location into their hands so as to awaken their lost leader. It meant that there was a little Elvishness in the Drow, and a little Drowishness in the Elves (plus some more rabid extremists). It gave the players a sense that they were at Ground Zero of great events that (as players) they were well aware of – but that the true story was a lot dirtier and grittier than the sanitized versions that would be written into the future history books (or their narrative equivalents).

Here’s the thing: from the very beginning, I had the notion that there was something imprisoned in the Pyramid (which was the shape of the dungeon – it was an ‘above-ground’ dungeon), and that this discovery would lead to significant consequences within the game world. I had some notion of what had happened to the Drow – they were a subversive sub-culture within the Elvish population – but everything else above was devised after the PCs, bummed about the lack of loot in the dungeon (who hides goodies in a purpose-built prison?) decided to wake the sleeping elf on the throne by breaking the enchantment that held him in unending Stasis. Part of it was off-the-cuff (enough to create a cliff-hanger ending to the game session), and the rest was created between game sessions.

This was a very early example of The First Revision, but because it was completely compatible with the background that they had been given, it was accepted by the players with only a brief blinking of their eyes as the revelations mounted and were assimilated.

More difficulties can arise when you can’t wrap the new information in a shroud of ignorance that justifies the background information given to the players. There is too great a disparity in potential impacts and specifics to offer much guidance on how to handle it – but the GM should be aware that he is jerking part of the ground out beneath the players feet, and behave accordingly. Hopefully, he has marshaled convincing justifications for making the change, and offers some sort of sweetener for anyone with a legitimate grievance over the changes.

Most problematic of all is when the change means that a central pillar of the campaign’s game-play vanishes, when some part of the adventures to date no longer makes sense. There are two possible solutions to this: (1) rewrite the past to accommodate the changes and communicate those changes to the players; (2) introduce a plotline that leads to the change being effective from now on, rewriting the campaign reality and making the PCs instrumental in the process. If you can trust the players not to mess it up, not go off on some tangent or get “creative”, (2) is the better solution in many cases. I save (1) for only the most extreme situations where (2) is not a viable option for some reason. And if the problem isn’t significant enough to warrant such a solution? Then neither is the change – live with the existing material or the contradiction, or devise some reason why it’s a lot more important than it initially appears.

18. The First Departure

Inevitably, you will have a player decide to drop out. Sometimes this happens in dramatic circumstances; in other cases, the player might be courteous enough to give you enough notice that you can work their departure into the plotline. If the character is too central to future planned events, you may need to consider making them an NPC or seeking the current players’ permission to give the character to a new player – then start working through your waiting list. If you can incorporate some capacity for the new owner to revise the character and make it his own, without impacting on the character’s past, so much the better.

In some cases, the death of the character will be the impetus for the departure. I’ve had players tell me, in the past, that while they had enjoyed playing their deceased character, they weren’t wrapped in the campaign setting and didn’t think any replacements could be as much fun, so they were bowing out. I’ve also had one PC who deliberately sought out a Heroic Death in furtherance of a Cause that the character believed in – the player saw an opportunity, and went for it. Sir Licheam earned his place amongst the heroes of his homeland the hard but Noble way!

How the GM copes when someone he thought was a bedrock part of the campaign chooses to depart is a critical test of his abilities – fail the test in the worst possible way, and you can not only lose the player, you can lose the friendship. Every alternative outcome is an improvement on this dire situation. The best solutions retain the friendship, permit the player to depart with his dignity intact, leave no hard feelings, and preserve the integrity of the campaign as an ongoing game. I’m pleased to say that I’ve gotten it right more often than I’ve gotten it wrong – to the point where a departing player has returned shortly afterwards with a new character (it’s not fair to take the revised character off the new owner unless both are willing).

Equally significant should be the change in attitude/approach that the GM has towards his game; something that he thought was settled has just gone “poof” and vanished in a cloud of smoke. The lingering question of whether or not something more could have been done to salvage the situation should provoke a little soul-searching and a review of what the GM is doing and how he is doing it – just because only one player has decided to call it quits, that doesn’t mean that others aren’t discontented to a lesser degree. In fact, ideally, you will notice warning signs and make changes before things develop to that extent – a subject that I intend to explore in next week’s article.

19. The First Buy-In

From the lowest of the lows to the highest of the highs – a player shows up and asks to join the campaign. I’ve had this happen a number of times – it hasn’t always ended well. I wrote about just such an occasion in one of my early articles here at Campaign Mastery — Moral Qualms on the Richter Scale — but it wasn’t the only one. One of my most painful experiences behind the GM screen was when I had to tell a handicapped player that the other players were insisting that he depart the campaign because he was ruining their fun to the point where ultimatums were issued. I still think that I could have handled that better – if I had unlimited time at my disposal, I might have been able to offer him a solo campaign, for example; my circumstances at the time didn’t allow for it – and I will always regret the way it worked out; I hope that he found a group to play in where his problems could have been accommodated. He worked harder at his gaming than anyone I’ve met before or since, and in the right group, he would have been an asset.

But sometimes, the stars align and the new player becomes a mainstay of the campaign. I’ve had that happen on several occasions, too.

A word of caution, too – following one of the departures described in the previous section, it came to light that two of the players who had bought-into the campaign had done so with the deliberate intent of sabotaging it because they were tired of not having enough good players for the campaigns they wanted to run. I had the best players and the game to be in, at the time, so that campaign became their target. It almost worked – in the end, only he and his collaborator departed, having ruined the adventure for everyone. I was eventually persuaded not to let them “win” and to write up the adventure as a work of fiction, a process that took many weeks; i actually presented that write-up here at Campaign Mastery — If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis — and it’s worth noting that the player in question has admitted to being mentally ill at the time, and making questionable decisions. He has been forgiven (as has his collaborator), but both remain unwelcome in my games – not that this is a bother to either of them.

There are genuine player buy-ins, but as with any other human activity, people can be complicated and sometimes, the motive can be an ulterior one. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you can reform human nature because your campaign is so compelling; it’s not going to happen. Appreciate the upvote when someone wants to join, and get on with doing the things that brought them hither.

20. The Stable Campaign

This is a very subtle milestone, often only recognized in retrospect. When it is applied to TV shows, the show is described as “appointment TV” – viewers have gotten into the habit of switching over to that show on that day at that time, it’s just what they do. To a large extent, appointment TV is far more resilient than other shows; it’s slower to grow its audience (if they were interested, they would already be watching) but they are slower to depart when there’s a dip in quality or other disliked development, for example a star leaving. Most viewers of appointment TV will give the show a season to replace the lost magic, whatever it was, and enough will enjoy the result that they will continue to tune in – so even then it will be slower than most to lose its audience.

Like such programming, an RPG campaign can become a routine habit, and so long as nothing changes, it will simply keep going for game-session after game-session. Inevitably, something will happen to upset that routine; but it is when you and/or your players first think of the campaign that way, as an old comfortable shoe, that this milestone has been achieved (and was almost certainly achieved a while back with no-one noticing at the time).

Achievement of a stable campaign can have profound influence over a GM’s thinking, and not always to their advantage. Some become so wary of upsetting the apple cart that they become more conservative, and the campaign more boring; such campaigns are ripening for a sudden collapse, or for a panicky reinvention by the GM when he perceives such an collapse to be imminent. In such circumstances, GMs (like most people) often go too far and throw the baby out with the bathwater – triggering a campaign collapse for exactly the opposite reason. Other GMs worry about the campaign becoming boring, and grow more adventurous immediately – this is less risky but brings that risk to the table with every game session. What you want to do is to reinvent the campaign without changing anything, and that’s phenomenally difficult to achieve. I’ll talk more on that subject in next week’s article, too. Ultimately, you have to remember the reasons why your campaign has become stable – players who enjoy what you’re doing enough to turn up, game session after game session. Avoid growing any more or less adventurous in your game planning, and enjoy the ride. After a while, almost all the game prep will be done already for any given adventure, and you can start reclaiming some of your lost free time – or start putting it into the development of a new campaign!

21. Campaign Evolution

Another subtle milestone. Any campaign that’s been played for a while has evolved, little by little, bit by bit, as all sides input into it. Eventually, something will happen to invite a retrospective look at the campaign – the triggers for this can be many – and you will suddenly realize that it bears very little resemblance, beyond the superficial, to what you expected it to be.

GMs react to this realization in different ways; some start trying to steer things back toward their original course, ignoring the fact that the biggest source of drift is satisfying the players. Others shrug their shoulders and say a metaphoric “Que Sera, Sera”. The best go back to their campaign plans and revisit the question of how those should change, given the newly-appreciated status quo is so different from the expectations upon which that plan was founded.

This milestone, then, should trigger a revision of GM planning, and that in turn can (and probably will, and probably should) lead to changes within the campaign – perhaps even changes great enough to altar the stability of the campaign.

The evolution of the campaign tends to occur through a steady drift; it’s certainly a mature-campaign phenomenon, but is also often a stable-campaign phenomenon.

22. Techno Revolution

Keep at things long enough, and technology will change the way you do things, which in turn will change the nature of the campaign that you’re running (even if it doesn’t impact the content of the campaign). Back when I was starting out, there was no internet, and no chance of being able to buy a computer even if there was such a thing. There was no google, and no Wikipedia. Research was a matter of listing possible relevant subjects, going to the library, and pawing through relevant reference books (and before I turned 5, even that wasn’t an option). When I started my first campaign, PCs were just barely starting to break through into the business world and the Apple-II was the state of the computing art.

My first computer was something called the Aquarius – an all-plastic computer from Mattel. I didn’t have the optional cassette drive, so any program had to be input from scratch. It had a whole 4K of ram, about 3.8 of which was actually usable. I had learned programming on a mainframe (a PDP-11, from memory) in a 1-week summer school at the University of NSW, and honed my capabilities on Apple-II PCs at school in my final year before graduation. But what the Aquarius forced you to learn was brutal efficiency; every instruction took only one byte of the memory, so you could have a program that was about 3800 ‘words’ long – but any text string that was intended to make sense of the results was one-for-one. Amongst other things, I wrote a stock market simulator on that machine and probed fractals and code-making and breaking.

Like a lot of people, Commodore computers were the real start of my computer ownership, as I bought a second-hand unit through the newspaper classifieds. I’d been using a friend’s C-64 for a while, but this was even better – it was a Commodore-128! – and I did some extremely advanced things with it through the years – writing my own printer driver, word processor and relational database, for example – for gaming purposes (a TORG spell creation system). I also wrote a sophisticated automated NPC generator which did everything from stats to skills to personalities – I created 10,000 NPCs in a night with that one, and still use one of them from time to time.

I then traded up to a windows-based laptop that was on loan so that I could create a new font for a friend, part of an ambitious project to map every possible character onto different code pages (others had the same idea, which is now known as Unicode and is almost universal). That’s how I can enter an unlikely character like “œ” and have it display – no offense intended to anyone whose language uses what was a random choice!) Of course, I was free to use this machine for my own purposes as well, and those purposes were gaming – though the lack of a printer held me back somewhat.

From there, I moved up to my own windows-based PC. It was no longer portable, but that was all right because I had a very fast 2000-dpi laser printer. And I had internet – this was when I was involved in the first attempt to bring broadband to the Australian masses. Still no google, though – but research became a whole lot easier. This was the time of the browser wars – Alta-vista vs Internet Explorer. I floated back and forth between the two while I was learning HTML (the language from which basic websites are made, and which I still use in writing posts here at Campaign Mastery).

These days, I’m back on a laptop because my replacement for the replacement for that original computer started suffering from Hard Disk problems that ultimately cost me almost everything on it – I had backups, but the data couldn’t be entirely recovered from them, and for some of the material I had relied on a DOS-based file splitter to spread the archives over multiple CD-ROM disks – one that wouldn’t recombine them properly even though it had worked fine when I tested it. A lot of my old work got lost around that time.

Not all of it, though – I still use the Win-98 calculator (faster to load, more user-friendly in scientific mode), and still nut out complicated table structures using Frontpage Express, and in general, still use about a dozen of the programs gathered in my Win98 days.

The whole point being that with every change in technology, the approach that I had to employ to translate my creativity into playable game changed. If I had to, I could go back to old-old-old-school pen and paper, but it would be slower and the results would not be as good – I’m a lot faster as a typist, even without fully mastering touch-typing. Each time the technology changes, what I can develop and present to the players as a game experience also changes, and the campaigns inevitably morph as a result into something slightly different.

In the course of 2020, I learned the art of creating animated Gifs. Because of the work involved, it’s not something that I can do all the time, but it’s there when I need it.

Last week, a reader contacted me and offered yet another example: he had constructed an RPG soundboard that he wanted to make available to readers. You can find it at tabletopy.com and it looks impressive (hint – scroll down on each page to see more sounds). The menu is repeated at the bottom of each page for your convenience, as well. (If you can’t hear anything, turn your volume levels up). Unlike some soundboards that I’ve seen, this lets you layer and stack sound effects and vary the volume of each individually, and they will persist even when moving to another page of the site. Some of them will undoubtedly be useful beyond fantasy, though that’s the genre for which they are primarily aimed – the crowd sound, for example. This is yet another change in the technology available to me – I’ve experimented a little in this direction in the past, but found the delay between launching a sound, and it actually starting to play, killed the effectiveness. The tabletopy soundboard is MUCH faster – so something that I considered off the table is now suddenly back in my palette of resources.

My campaigns will change a little, as a result. What will the next change be?

Every technological change is therefore a campaign milestone. It doesn’t even have to be your technology that changes – if a technical change alters the way a player uses his character, for example having an image of their character that they can display at will without searching for it, or can search through the rules or their character sheet for exactly what they are looking for, that change will impact the way that player interfaces with the game, and you will have to adapt your campaign to the change.

Campaign Twilight

At some point, the campaign will end. This could occur unexpectedly, even accidentally, or it could be deliberate. The moment the GM decides to begin working toward a conclusion of the campaign (perhaps inspired by one of the articles on staging a big finish here at Campaign Mastery), the campaign enters its twilight. That means that it could be in that stage for a long time before the players become aware that things are headed for a showdown.

23. The End In Sight

This is actually two different milestones, but only one will apply – whichever one comes later.

The first is when a clear pathway to the campaign’s conclusion becomes apparent to the GM. There may have been several game sessions in which he is maneuvering ‘chess pieces’ around the metaphoric game board to make that conclusion both possible and satisfying, in fact that is usually the case. When I was looking to finish up the Zenith-3 campaign on Earth-Halo (so-called because the laws of physics were slightly different and that manifested in a glowing halo around the earth, stunting their astronomy, which had consequent knock-on effects), I had a direct path to ending the campaign but it felt forced and would not have been very satisfactory. So it took a while to maneuver events to the point where a satisfactory epic conclusion became possible. Those plans were then tossed out because the players wanted to take the next phase of the campaign in a different direction to the one I had planned – so I was forced to run a fill-in adventure or two that started new plot threads and put that planned finish off the table while I integrated what they wanted with what I had intended to provide. It took another two years of game play to build back to the point where the Earth-Halo campaign could end, and the Earth-Regency campaign could begin.

The second one is when the players become aware that things are coming to a head, and the campaign as they have known it is likely to come to an end sometime soon. I think the case of the Earth-halo campaign, it was the penultimate adventure when they became aware that things were going over the top. It would have been obvious sooner, but I ran an adventure based on a Star Trek: TNG episode that stuck them in a recurring loop of time in which they (and the planet) were destroyed by a Dalek ship exploding in the wrong place at the wrong time. They started to figure out what was happening, and found ways to bootstrap that information into a future loop, and gradually found their way to the cause of the explosion (something they now did!) which enabled them to change the critical events. The good news was that this averted the loop in time, the bad news was that the Daleks now knew about Earth having a technologically-advanced race (the PCs came from Earth and had a starship, so this wasn’t a difficult deduction for them to make). Having undone the events that created the time loop, they found themselves at its beginning once again, this time with events playing out without the consequences of the cosmic explosion. This was an adventure or two prior to that penultimate adventure, and was a deliberate red herring – I was quite sure that they wouldn’t expect the big finish so quickly after blowing everything up and killing them all, half a dozen times.

24. The Final Adventure

This is the biggest milestone of them all. It starts at the beginning of the final adventure within the campaign, and ends with the final words from the GM – which may or may not be the traditional “The End”. It marks the ultimate change of focus with respect to this campaign on the part of the GM – he stops paying much attention to it at all. Unless, of course, he’s deliberately left behind some plot seeds that can sprout into a sequel campaign (a two-part article, there’s a link at the bottom of part 1 to take you to part 2).

After all, if the campaign was satisfying, the conclusion was thrilling, why wouldn’t you want to keep going? From the moment a campaign becomes Stable, I start scattering plot seeds as I go. Some of these will be the foundation of ad-hoc fill-in adventures in the main campaign, but most will remain fallow until the time is right to turn them into a new campaign. This enables me to reuse a lot of the campaign and adventure prep from the old campaign, saving huge amounts of time and effort. After all, your goal has to be to try and make the sequel even better than the original, right? Even if you don’t succeed, that’s the surest method of actually achieving parity between the two.

But it might be that you want the campaign to end with no sequel. I fully expect the current superhero campaign to be my last – I have absolutely no superhero ideas that have not been incorporated into it, and by the time we’re finished (at the current rate), I’ll be 76 years old, and one of my players will be in his mid-eighties! If I can arrange it, I’d like for the end to come in late September of 2041, even though that means letting that rough schedule slip by a couple of years – because that would be the campaign’s 60th anniversary, and that seems a rather appropriate way to mark the milestone. It could work out that way – I fully expect the final adventure of the campaign to take at least a year to play out, and it could easily be two. But it will end when it ends.

Just Like Starting Over

And, usually, when one campaign ends, it’s time to start thinking about the next one. Actually, it’s a long way past time – that’s why I recommend starting to gather preliminary thoughts and ideas as soon as your current campaign stabilizes.

Take the Zener Gate campaign – this always had a planned ending. At the moment, that ending is 5 adventures or so away – with the average being one-to-two game sessions per adventure. Right now, by choosing to watch instead of acting to ensure that history unfolded the way they want it to, the PCs have let a Chinese assassin kill the general who was instrumental in getting the program that recruited them for time travel up and running, and it is now directly controlled by Eric Trump, and all their history and achievements in the campaign to date – preventing WWIII, preventing war with the Martians who invented Time Travel, and so on – have been knocked into a cocked hat. Instead of them working for the survival and betterment of mankind, temporal agents will be busy doing what they were supposed to do: rewriting history to make it more “Trump-Friendly”. Opposing them will be the Chinese, who are working to make the world more “Chinese success-prone”. So they now have ground-zero seating at the venue of a time war. The way the game physics works is that every second time-jump has to be random – they chose their current location to infiltrate the Pentagon and measure the consequences of their stuff-up, so their next one will be random (i.e. at the GM’s whim) and then they can try and undo the mess that they have created.

If it weren’t for Lockdown stealing three months out of the gaming schedule, they would have completed this attempt to repair time by now – they already have a handle on how to do so – and we would be down to three adventures remaining in the campaign, a projected end date of early in 2022.

Always one to follow my own advice, I started thinking about what to replace it with more than a year ago. The decision was taken to resume the Warcry campaign despite the loss – now many years ago – of one of the key players.

All campaigns end. How they end – and what they consist of prior to that ending – is up to you. The one thing that is certain is that there will be historical milestones to look back upon – some recognized at the time for what they were, and some visible only in hindsight. These are the markers of a successful campaign, one that has seen adversity and overcome it, and made itself memorable to such an extent that it likely to be referenced in player and GM anecdote for years to come.

And that, my friends, seems a wonderfully up-beat and forward-looking note on which to end this, the one thousandth post to feature my by-line in singular isolation. Hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far!

999!

This is my 999th post at Campaign Mastery! Next week, four figures, a landmark achievement and one that I am quite proud of reaching!

Old Words

Today’s article is all about looking back, which is a natural thing to do when you approach any milestone. And yet, the connection with the currently-imminent landmark is something that only occurred to me in hindsight, not the inspiration behind this article. I’ll get to what the actual inspiration is at the end of this particular road.

Specifically, the is article is all about looking back to the beginnings of a campaign after you’ve been playing for a while.

Why?

Plans carefully laid at the start of a campaign have a habit of becoming increasingly disconnected from the reality as game-play evolves.

Reviewing your playbook not only permits you to update it to incorporate the reality, but lets you selectively reincorporate the little things that you’ve forgotten, in effect infusing the campaign that is with your original intentions, keeping the best and tossing the rest. I’ll get into some of the specific benefits as we deal with each part of the process.

New Directions

Ideas are often lost in the shuffle as the campaign, under the influence of players doing the unexpected, and the GM extemporizing and landing on his feet, finds unexpected and unplanned resolutions through unexpected pathways. No adventure survives contact with players!

The inevitable result is that the campaign drifts away from its roots as time passes. In some ways, that’s a good thing; it is evolving in response to the participation of the players, as though it were a living, breathing, thing – a campaign that remains exactly on track despite ten sessions of play is usually one that’s in trouble.

But it can mean that opportunities and intentions can go missing, and recapturing those is the aim of the process. And, by giving the GM a chance to take stock, it can present new opportunities and new directions in which the campaign can travel.

20/20 hindsight

Hindsight is sometimes said to be 20/20, meaning that we can see more clearly in retrospect that we can at the time. That’s often a case of being able to see not just the trees, but the forest.

It’s also true that we all get better at things through practice, and examining the conceptual underpinnings of a campaign can often exploit that increase in skill at a more fundamental level.

But hindsight reveals nothing if we never look back. And the only way a busy GM can take the time to look back is if they bake it into their schedule.

How Often

How long is a while? I’d peg this as something to do every ten days of real-time play. It isn’t something that has to be done in one quick burst, so spread it out over the next couple of game sessions.

• Campaign Beginning
• Game Sessions 1-9
• Game Session 10, Commence Review
• Game Session 11, Half-done
• Game Session 12, Complete review
• Game Sessions 13-21
• Game Session 22, Commence Review
• Game Session 23, Half-done
• Game Session 24, Complete 2nd review
  ….and so on.

Since game prep is one of the key determining factors in how often you play, this naturally anchors the intensity with which the task needs to be carried out to the time that’s available.

It’s worth appreciating how this schedule relates to real time. If you play once a week, that’s a quarterly review. If you play once a fortnight, that’s a biannual review. If you play once a month, that’s an annual review.

At least in theory. In practice, you’ll probably take twice as long and carry out the reviews half as often – biannually, annually, and biennial, respectively. That’s fine.

But, a word of warning: This proposed schedule breaks the overall review process into two parts of approximately equal size. The first part is static in size (i.e. time and effort required), while the second is proportional to the number of game sessions since your last review. So if you go twice as long between reviews, the first part will be only 1/3 of the total task, and the expectation is that it will probably take three ‘game sessions’ rather than two.

Complicating this scheduling even more is the need to prioritize what you need for your ongoing campaign and adventure development – no matter what, you have to be as ready to play as possible when that bell rings. The longer any process that is external to that requirement, like this one, takes, the more likely it is that something will happen to get in the way – that’s why I said that the time needed for the overall task would double.

The Process

The first part of the process has four stages:

1. Development Notes
2. Campaign Plan
3. Campaign Notes
4. Campaign Background

The second part has – nominally – just one:

5. Adventures / Game Sessions played since the last review began

…but that’s a very broad summary of what’s a very substantial task.

Campaigns Without

Not all campaigns will have all four or even all five elements. Whether or not they should is a decision to be considered some other time; the bottom line is that you can only review what material there is to review. These documents are all beneficial to a campaign, enough so that I would rarely consider running a campaign without any of them – but I have done so in the past, and developed them as an afterthought, usually in far less structured and comprehensive form.

If your campaign doesn’t have one of these, you can either skip reviewing it, or – if you decide that you really should have one – spend the ‘review time’ creating one retroactively, so that at the next review you will have a baseline to measure against.

Campaigns Underway

The longer your campaign has been running, the more beneficial this process can potentially be, because there has been greater scope for things to be forgotten or overlooked and for the campaign to have drifted.

It might be that you need to allocate a much larger time to the review process, or that you need to skim a little more and then focus on those elements that will prove beneficial. Almost certainly, you will need to adapt the process, and will probably find that some specifics have escaped you and are probably gone forever.

If this is your first review and the campaign has been ongoing for some time, take as long as it takes; just be methodolical, and remember that the longer you take, the more there will be to do at your next review.

Let’s say that the first review covers 100 game sessions and takes eleven sessions (one for part 1 and ten sets of game sessions taken 10 at a time). That means that it will be complete around the time of game session 111, and that as soon as you finish, it will be time to start the next review.

But that review only has to cover 11 game sessions – though, being more recent, these will often contain more details. So, let’s say that it takes twice as long as it normally would. That’s one session for the first part and three more for the second (rounding up)- which means that by game session 115, you will be all caught up.

At game session 120, you can then proceed as normal.

The lesson is not to be afraid to adapt this process for your own usage. It might be that you can draw a line in the metaphoric sand and say “Background materials and as far back as this – anything else won’t be relevant”. I don’t recommend such a practice, but if that’s what you need to do to make the process work for you, so be it!

1. Development Notes

Every campaign starts as a loose collection of ideas, often compiled over a period of time, and then winnowed out when the time comes to actually start campaign development in earnest. Every few years, I skim my way through those notes – you never know when you’ll uncover a forgotten idea whose time has come. That habit becomes formalized, more regular, and more frequent under this process.

These ideas can be classified into several categories, and get treated differently as a result.

There are:

• Ideas that have been incorporated into the current campaign – these get ticked if I’m using a hardcopy or color coded if working digitally. Color-coding just means that I change the font color of that piece of text.
• Ideas that are supposedly incorporated into the current campaign but have not been especially prominent in that campaign, or have not been executed to your satisfaction. These get a purple or black dot if manual processing is taking place or get color-coded purple otherwise.
• Ideas that have been explicitly earmarked for use in a different campaign – these get highlighted.
• Ideas that don’t integrate well with the first category of ideas or that were otherwise deemed unsatisfactory or undesirable at the time. These get a red cross manually or color-coded red digitally.
• Ideas that are adrift, neither in nor out. These get a blue dot manually or color coded blue digitally.

At the start of a review, I’ll color code everything plain black with no highlighting so that I’m forced to evaluate each idea afresh. That’s important because these classifications can change from review to review – that’s part of the point of doing all this.

With the ideas that are already supposed to be in your campaign, you are looking at how well they have been executed, and how influential they have been. These are relative measures, so you need a standard – I have two and use both. The first is relative to the other ideas that have been incorporated; the second is relative to the potential of the idea for creating interesting situations and plotlines in the campaign as it actually is. Occasionally, these reviews will spark new ideas, which get jotted down appropriately, but it’s more important just to keep them in mind.

The ideas that have been excluded or that haven’t worked can also be important; you need to be sure that there have been no oversights or conceptual holes in the campaign development. These present a choice – you can either think about new ways of expressing and developing them, or you can think about revising/replacing them.

And then, finally, there are the ideas that are just sitting there, unused. Quite often, these will connect with plot holes and problems that were never anticipated at the time the campaign was devised.

Reviewing the original notes, ultimately, provides context for other parts of the process. Everything else you get out it is a bonus – but there will usually be an unexpected dividend at some point from this review. At the very least, they can help give direction when you need to make ad-hoc decisions in the future.

There are a couple of other things that I look for that are important enough to highlight here:

Directions Lost

Original intentions are revealed in their purest form in the campaign notes. Sometimes, events have headed in entirely different directions.

The seeds of the campaign that IS are buried somewhere in the development notes, whether you realized it or not – by definition, since you managed to get from there to here, wherever your campaign currently is.

Comparing the two and identifying the differences helps isolate what you and your players really want from the campaign – an invaluable contribution to the task of achieving that.

Ultimately, whenever the campaign doesn’t match the original concept, you have to ask “why?” and “is it an improvement?” – and then act on those evaluations as appropriate.

Paths Not Taken

Think about this for a moment. Your development notes contain, let’s say, ten ideas (it’s usually many more, but roll with me on this).

Three of those actually made it all the way to become central pillars of the campaign as you conceived it.

ONE of those survived the campaigns interaction with the PCs; the other two are there in the background, but muted. Instead, other ad-hoc choices have become featured – ideas that probably weren’t even on your list of ten in the first place.

It’s always useful to look through those discarded thoughts looking for elements that can be used to bolster and reinforce and develop the ad-hoc campaign ideas.

Which of your unused ideas do they most closely resemble (if any)? Are there plot seeds that were discarded as irrelevant to the three intended pillars of the campaign that might now become relevant/useful?

2. Campaign Plan

At it’s simplest, a Campaign Plan breaks a larger overall story (the campaign) down into planned plotlines and adventures. Everything else is all about making it more efficient to use in game prep.

Some GMs don’t like to look that far ahead; they might keep vague ideas of how it will all end in the back of their heads, but they will only look two or three or whatever adventures ahead.

There are many, many variations. Some parts of the campaign might be well-mapped, while others are almost completely responsive to player decisions and intentions.

So, what does a review of a campaign plan encompass?

The Unnoticed Left Turns

Where has the campaign diverged from the plan? I’ve mentioned this before, but any campaign that follows the plan too closely is in trouble; a good campaign should be full of deviations, some minor, some major.

The campaign plan structure that I’m using for my Zenith-3 campaign consists of campaign plot arcs that stretch between many different adventures. There are some for each character, some for specific locations, some for the whole group, and some for a specific occasion.

Each of these is broken up into events or plot milestones – specific in-game events. These are then scheduled so that the individual plot threads express themselves at a natural pace, weaving all those plot threads together into a broader tapestry.

When I add all these together, fill in any blanks to ensure that all the PCs have something to be doing, and wrap it all around a central plotline or focal point, I end up with an individual adventure.

I’ve written about this structure in greater detail several times before, in far greater detail, but that’s enough to be going on with.

Whenever there is an unexpected left turn in the campaign, the events that comprise relevant plot arcs may need revision or replacing, because the story that WAS there no longer matches the reality on the ground. The alternative is to insert a new event that restores the original plot direction – not always possible, but always something to consider.

That’s what this aspect of the review is all about – revising the campaign plan to take into account the changes that have taken place in-game. In other words, this takes player input from the game-play and integrates it (and their future plans) into your future plans, ensuring that the campaign plan remains fit for purpose.

Forks In the Road

One of the purposes of the review is to actually Revise the campaign plan.

Elements of the Campaign Plan fall into three fairly familiar-looking categories:

• Those that are still in play, essential to the campaign;
• Those that will be adapted to serve a new purpose
• The irrelevant.

As soon as you campaign diverges from the plan (and they always do), some of your planned plots cease to be relevant – which means that one of two things should happen: either they get adapted because the plot sounds like it will be fun, or they should be strip-mined for ideas and replaced with new plans that reflect the reality of where the campaign has been, and where the players want it to go in the future.

3. Campaign Notes

Campaign notes are the non-historical briefing that gets given to the players so that they can generate characters that will fit into the campaign.

What usually happens is that some of these notes become central to the campaign and its characters, some become relevant but peripheral, and some just get forgotten or abandoned. The latter include ideas that were bad from the get-go (but not recognized as such) and ideas that were not properly developed from the campaign notes.

As usual, the classification mandates different treatment. I start with the forgotten/abandoned material.

It’s important to realize that we’re not just talking about relevance right now, but over the totality of the campaign, as defined by the campaign plan. What hasn’t mattered in the campaign to date might become centrally important at a planned future time, towards which you are building – the puppet-master placing his building blocks exactly where he needs them to be.

At the same time, just because something isn’t relevant right now usually doesn’t mean that it can be ignored; on the contrary, it imposes constraints on what can be done by characters right now, whether the players realize it or not. Players can stumble over these building blocks at any time – the problem comes when they recognize it as potentially being a problem in the future and decide to remove it before that happens. This creates a “fork in the road”, and the campaign has gone in the wrong direction in terms of following the plan. Sometimes, the result can be more attractive scenery along the way but you can still end up in almost the same place; at other times, you need to come up with a way to replace that lost building block with something more subtle, or find a way to make the players think they have achieved this goal when, in reality, they haven’t.

Another way of looking at this stage of the review is looking for additional consequences of the material you have and evaluating whether or not they are desirable – and if they are, how you can best bring them to light. Be wary of changing something that a player is relying on with his character, though – you may need to prepare two different interpretations (one with the consequence and one which removes it) – and then let your player(s) choose between them. You should also never take an ability away without replacing it with something equally effective!

All that being said, if your review opens up a new direction in which the character can grow and develop, it can be an opportunity not to be neglected.

In addition, there are three things that I’m on the lookout for when reviewing Campaign Notes that need to be singled out:

Lost Treasures

Character elements that have been forgotten – decision time: is this actually necessary? Can it be expunged or replaced? Or is it a neglected gold-mine whose time has finally come?

The more of your character notes that actually impacts the campaign and what the characters do within it, the more distinctive and unique you campaign becomes. And if it doesn’t work out the way you want, you can always add a plotline that restores the status quo.

Another approach is to make a temporary change through circumstances that are not intended to last, as a sort of trial run – and incorporate an option for making it permanent. Many years ago, now, one of the PCs was temporarily transformed into a gargoyle, with razor-sharp claws. For a character who had always looked like a knight in shining armor, this was a radical change to say the least – but it was profoundly liberating for the character. While the original intent was to have the transformation undone at the end of that adventure, when the player handed the character over to a new owner, that owner decided that he liked the change, and the difference in expectations that people placed on the character. Publicly, the story was that the old character had left and been replaced with the new one – and a lot of baggage was lifted from the new character’s shoulders, and a whole new set of abilities were opened up. Instead of just being a tough guy, he became a shape-changer with great strength and the capacity to swallow things as though he were a living black hole. Eventually, that player was forced to step aside, and the character became the property of a third player. With a psych profile that explained everything that had happened to the character, a slow process of rehabilitation began; that process is now essentially complete, but the consequences of it are still rumbling through the campaign, and will reverberate for some time to come. A bland character has become rich, complex, and engaging. In essence, each owner has made the character his own.

Either way, lost gold can resurface in the campaign – but it has to make a difference, or it might as well not be there. That’s part of your obligations as GM.

Ice-cream Headaches

Sometimes, material that has been forgotten within the campaign notes creates a plot hole – something that should have happened, but didn’t, or something that shouldn’t have been possible, but happened anyway. Another of the GM’s jobs is to decide what to do about these and how to do it. I’ve devoted a series to the handling of such plot holes of various scales (I still have one more part to complete), the Elephant In The Grey Room series. Soon, I promise!

Terra Incognita

None of us are perfect, and we are all capable of oversights, of taking our eyes off the ball and missing golden opportunities because they were not recognized. As a result, parts of the campaign notes will have become critical to the characters and the campaign while other parts will just be sitting there.

Sometimes those neglected ideas connect with the parts of your future plans that you have just revised. They can enhance or contradict them, or simply offer a navigational path to the adventures, making the previously irrelevant relevant. And sometimes, they can be the source of a whole new batch of ideas with which to season your campaign ‘stew’.

I like to always have adventure ideas on standby in case something takes more development time than expected – something that I can pull out of my back pocket with minimal prep. This is one of the resources that can provide those ideas.

And sometimes, focusing on these neglected areas can open the campaign up to all kinds of new directions.

4. Campaign Background

The campaign background is the history that was (hopefully) expressed in the mechanics of the Campaign Notes. This is never complete, just as no one book can ever give the definitive history of the world – or even of one country or city. There’s always a new perspective or interpretation to consider!

Most GMs, at some point, fall into the trap of thinking their campaign backgrounds are sacrosanct; they build their campaigns around those backgrounds, use them to generate plotlines and adventures, and employ them as the connective tissue that links players to characters, characters to personalities, and characters to campaign.

It can always be an eye-opening journey to re-read your campaign background and note (a) what can be proven to have happened that way; (b) what parts of the background the ongoing campaign can provide substantiating evidence toward; (c) what parts of the background will gain substantiating evidence from future planned events within the campaign; and (d) what’s left. Everything in the latter category was an ‘official interpretation’, an ‘educated best guess’ – and NONE of it should necessarily be assumed to be Canon. In addition, there’s a subcategory within (a) of everything for which the official story seems incomplete, or which has a potential consequence that hasn’t been explored.

The trick is always to make these revelations relevant to the ongoing campaign in some way – briefly, for some time, or from the point of revelation onward..

Revisiting the background with this perspective can open new doors within the campaign.

The Muted Palette

Quite often, many of the background elements that have been emplaced within the campaign become muted and gray as characters are played, gradually hewing toward the central sourcebooks by virtue of the inbuilt game mechanics. No matter how distinct “Elves” may have been in your concepts, they gradually trend towards becoming generic “Elves” in play, with just one or two highlights of distinctiveness remaining, at best. Some of the neglected content has been ignored for good reason, but some of it can be absolute gold.

Future plans that can highlight some of the neglected uniqueness can go a long way toward evading the pastel palette problem.

Forgotten Textures

The place to put any “look-and-feel” guidance is in the campaign background, because that’s a more narrative structure. Once in place there, however, it can be easily forgotten and neglected. Sometimes, this can be accommodated as “we do things differently these days” (implying a ‘lost chapter’ of the background in which the change occurred), occasionally it is so distinctly different from the interpretations actually used in play that you have no choice but to take that approach; and sometimes this forgotten texture is just lying there, waiting for you. “A vortex of arcane energies swarm like streaks through the air and suddenly coalesce into a ball of fire that erupts toward the enemy” is nice narrative texture – but should then be employed whenever a mage casts a spell unless that description is contraindicated by the nature of the spell.

Extract or note these down, then use them henceforth! Your color text will become more consistent and internally believable as a result. Perhaps as important, the way you envisage these events transpiring in the course of play will also change, which will help you in interpreting them into game mechanics in a consistent way. Players like that, because it enables them to make decisions and have more confidence about what the GM will permit their characters to do..

An example from the Zenith-3 campaign – because the different metapowers (Magic, Psionics, and Martial Arts) are designed to be intentionally incompatible, the players assumed that they could not interact. An NPC with a brilliance for adaptive systems integration questioned that assumption and found it to be not necessarily true – and his innovative ways of combining these abilities toward a singular objective has become one of his trademark contributions to the campaign. For example, one of the abilities can be used to transform the environment in which one of the other abilities is operating, enabling consequences to emerge that would otherwise have been too difficult to orchestrate. Using his abilities, for example, he was able to employ a force-field created by a team-mate to act as a portal past an enemy’s otherwise impenetrable force-field, migrating one of the PCs someplace they were otherwise unable to go. Another time, he demonstrated that if a construct is created using one of the the metapowers that remains stable once that metapower is ceased, the other metapowers can operate on it with impunity..These take what would have merely been flavor text and make them integral tactical considerations, vastly expanding the team’s collective repertoire – but broadening the palette of what abilities their enemies can direct at them even more substantially.

5. Old Adventures

Finally, periodic reviews of old adventures can be extremely valuable. So much so that fully half of the review process (under the optimum schedule – and more, if not) consists of such reviews.

It’s rare for adventures to transpire exactly as planned – the players do something unexpected and the GM finds a way to accommodate and respond. This is the principle at the heart of one of Johnn’s best pieces of advice here at Campaign Mastery, Say Yes But Get There Quick.

There are several things to look for in these old adventures.

Unplanned Excursions

You’ve already looked into these, but that was in the context of the bigger picture, the overall campaign. But there are little bits here and there – scenes that never got played out, snatches of dialogue, descriptions and locations that were never needed. Every unplanned excursion within an adventure, even if the GM got things back on track to a satisfactory resolution at the end, yields such material – and some of it can be recycled, if you remember that it’s there.

Past Mistakes & Strokes Of ‘Brilliance’

Everyone’s imperfect and make mistakes. The GM is no different. When we’re skilled or lucky, we can hide these from the players so that they don’t get in the way of their sense of immersion and fun. On other occasions, the mistake is so large that we have to offer a Mea Culpa.

Some of the worst mistakes that can occur are the result of the GM parachuting a “Brilliant idea” into his adventure at the 13th hour, without subjecting it to adequate thought or development. Some of the GM’s greatest successes can come from the same source, to be fair.

By definition, none of these are part of the original adventure as it was planned. They are ALL inadequately documented – so it’s worth taking a few moments to correct that error.

In the process, you will discover plot holes that result. You have two choices: ignore these, or fill them. I’ve done a series on dealing with plot holes of different scales in a practical way, here at Campaign Mastery – but if you don’t look for the holes, you can’t fill them.

So document your ad-hoc changes, check your logic with the full power of hindsight, and then apply the advice in The Elephant In The Grey Room series.

The Devil is in the Details

Often, details will have been changed or constructed ad-hoc as necessary. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been able to take a character from being a minor NPC into one of the central pillars of the campaign – and its always twice as hard if the details are forgotten. So it’s worth taking the time to document any new or changed NPCs and look over their potential.

The same thing goes for locations, which will often recur within the campaign.

Finally, there are details that may have been overlooked.
♦ The PCs leaving an NPC tied up, who never reappears in the adventure,
♦ a PC giving an NPC their phone number;
♦ a PC causing trouble for an NPC by trying to pay with a 1000gp gemstone and expecting the NPC to be able to make change.

These little details can all become central parts of a new or future planned adventure idea.

♦ The PCs may have assumed that the NPC was taken into custody – an assumption you can stab them in the back with by having him escape and begin plotting a suitable revenge for his humiliation.
♦ The player may have forgotten flirting with the NPC waitress – it was just a bit of character color at the time – but it may have been a big deal to the NPC. What if they called but got rebuffed? What if they call and begin a new romantic entanglement with the PC?
♦ What did the NPC have to do to get that change? Taking that much liquidity of a business can be toxic to its future. Or perhaps there’s something special about the gem that no-one recognized at the time – but that now becomes centrally important to a plotline.

You can’t always hang a plot on these little details, but many of them have the potential for doing so – and players love it when campaigns become self=referential in this way, because it makes them feel like their characters are part of the campaign, driving its development with their choices.

Players very “generously” provide plot kindling to the GM quite regularly – but if the GM doesn’t take note of the details, they will become forgotten. Re-reading the past adventure serves as a reminder of the relevant details.

Loose Ends and Unexpected Consequences

The final thing to note are loose ends – often things that seemed complete at the time. Unexpected Consequences that logically should have occurred but that haven’t, yet, are an obvious source of new game material (often, you will need some way to justify the delay).

I was actually reflecting on the current epic adventure in my superhero campaign – which started a long time ago, now (back in 2019!) – and the many plot threads and elements that have been woven into it, the close to 100 significant or potentially significant NPCs that have been introduced and could pop up again at any time that seems interesting – when I thought of writing this article. So this is a case of my telling you about something I do as part of my Campaign Management that I haven’t discussed previously.

Plundering The Past

Your past creative efforts contain a wealth of material for you to build on. No campaign fully exploits everything that it has to offer – but having the rest on tap can take a campaign to the next level in this respect. So Plunder the past, not only for lessons in how to improve as a GM, but for inspiration and new ideas and forgotten treasures.

 

This is my 998th post at CM! Two more to the 4-figure milestone!

 

In my superhero campaign, the PCs are currently shopping for a building to convert into a base of operations for a second set of superhero/civilian Identities that UNTIL has prompted them to create so that they can deal with problems that they (and the UN) can’t officially be seen to be interfering in, but that are too serious for them not to deal with – spy- and political games within games, always lots of “fun”!

To some extent, I’m using this search as a plot vehicle, a way to add to the richness of the game world; to some extent, I’m using it to highlight existing riches that have largely gone unnoticed until now. And, of course, having a campaign-within-a-campaign provides endless opportunities for the campaigns to step on each other’s toes in-game, providing fresh challenges for the players and their characters.

It’s also posing new problems for me to solve as a GM. If you’re going to sell the PCs a building (and the land that it sits on), you need to have some idea of how much such things will cost, for example.

I’m currently a LONG way ahead of the game-play front in terms of plotting, so I spent most of the weekend just passed in creating a system to solve that very question.

Today’s article will examine the methodology and results before offering them as a 15-page free PDF download for other GMs to use.

I want to demonstrate how the work was done so that other GMs can not only extend or expand the system as necessary, but can satisfy similar needs in their own campaigns, regardless of genre.

Before we’re done, I’ll demonstrate how I intend to use the system in my campaign, and how it can be adapted to suit other campaigns.

I think I’ve caught and corrected any errors, but this will also equip you to make any corrections that may be necessary. Nor have I been entirely 100% consistent in some areas, because I was problem-solving as I went. I can live with that, but if you want to make the corrections, this will equip you to do so.

In addition to offering the results as a PDF, I am providing them in two spreadsheet formats to facilitate such corrections.

Today has been a public holiday here in Sydney, so I’m starting this late and intend to publish it a day later than usual.

That takes all the time pressure off, so that I don’t have to rush any aspect of the planned article.

Contents:

1. Production: Research
2. Production: Process
3. Production: Conversions
4. Production: Execution

   The first half of the article is all about how the PDF’s content was created, and will culminate in links that will enable you to download the results.

5. Usage
6. Example
7. Extension
8. Adaption

   The second half will deal with usage of the system, extending it as may be desired, and adapting it to other circumstances, even if the latter can only provide guidelines.

Production: Research

I’ve been curious about, and interested in, the pricing of real estate for a long time. I’ve raised the subject in conversation with a number of real estate agents as social contact permitted.

I had always assumed that there was some magic formula that could be adapted to RPG purposes. Base price, plus so much if on a corner, plus so much for each additional bedroom or square foot, plus so much for amenities, plus a factor for close to transport / shopping, plus so much for additional garage space, and so on.

The reality is very different. The actual practice boils down to looking at how much similar homes sold for in the area in the past, adding a fudge factor for how out of date those prices were, and adding another fudge factor for how much more desirable the agent thought they could make the home sound to a seller. And, if they managed to sell it for the asking price, all that happened was that a new baseline was added. Setting the price was a combination of marketing nous and instinct as much as it was a pseudo-scientific practice of increasing prices until the market squealed ‘enough!’

That won’t translate very well to an RPG system. But it gave me a huge amount of freedom when it came to developing such a system.

I started with a web search, which told me that for Australian homes valued at between AU$500K and AU$1m (most urban real estate in the cities), additional bedrooms that increased the total floor space added 50K to 80K each in 2020. I also learned that additional bedrooms pre-pandemic could add as much as 95K (2017 AUD) but that being under-bathroomed could cost as much as 205K (2017 AUD) on the final value – and that this loss would increase with additional bedrooms, by increasing the paucity of bathrooms.

I also learned that in pricey suburbs, the value of an extra bedroom could be as much as +160K to +500K (2017 AUD) but that this rate would decline with each additional bedroom unless the total land available also increased disproportionately. For a given block of land, there was an optimum dwelling size which naturally subdivided into an optimum bedroom-and-bathroom count after common areas were subtracted from the floor plans.

I was momentarily tempted to think of this in terms of a negative acceleration of price which aggregated (integrated) into a specific value for additional bedrooms, which then aggregated into a combined additional value for the building – but this was already way more complicated than I wanted to get.

Finally, I already knew that the 1986 US price of a three-bedroom home in the US was $80,300.

Confused? It’s quite a melange of facts and figures, from different dates and places, but it gave me the foundations that I needed.

Production: Process

Before I could translate that morass into a set of values, I needed to decide on the basic process that the system would utilize. How was I going to abstract the process of Valuing a specific property?

NB: As I started writing this section I became aware of a potential source of confusion: multiple meanings of the term “value”. So, here’s the general rule: When the word is Capitalized, it refers to the final Value of a dwelling. When it is not, it refers to the impact of a variable within the process of determining that Value.

I started by breaking general impressions of the building and its location into identifiable values which were to be multiplied together.

Both factors would then be multiplied by another factor that would rate whether or not the home came with more land or less than would normally be expected.

This approach generalized a huge number of variables into a single impact on the value, and meant that I could approach the overall problem from the point of view of valuing a ‘generic standard home’.

Because it was what I had statistics for, I chose a three-bedroom home as being the standard. In a third table, I could apply a fixed ‘basic adjustment’ for the number of bedrooms – a different value for the minimum and maximum Base Value.

These two values could be combined with a random value to select where in the resulting range a specific home would be located. Because I wanted something that looked basically like a dumbbell curve (values crowding toward the center or median value, with more extreme valuations – high or low – less likely), I chose 3d6.

Initially, that was where the process was going to end, but I knew that there were two additional problems that I had to account for.

On day 2, after I had started work on actually putting numbers to all these variations and generating the tables, I figured out how to solve three major holes in the process.

The first was a value multiplier for the size of the urban community around the dwelling. The standard was set to “town’ (without actually defining what a ‘town’ was, permitting that to default to the usual usage in a given campaign setting). This separated out farm houses from those in a large city.

The second was how to factor in the value of any business that was attached – whether that was simply using the dwelling as a boarding house or hotel, or a built-in shopfront (presumably with accommodations on upper floors or out the back), or whatever.

And the third was a fudge-factor to be applied to the die roll to reflect high sentimental value or especially skilled salespeople.

With those decisions, the basic methodology that would be used to determine the value of a specific property was complete.

I’ve glossed over as many specifics as possible because I didn’t know what those specifics would be, on the first day – I needed to establish the methodology so that I could work out what those values were to be.

I also used my game (and house rules) design experience to estimate how many values in each variable I could afford to use such that the resulting tables would be of manageable size.

The final design consideration was that the resulting tables would NOT be designed to be suitable for printing. That meant that for ‘the big tables’ I could put all sixteen 3d6 results, and preliminary calculations, across a page that could be improbably wide; I was more concerned with what would be legible when viewed on a screen, specifically, my screen.

If I hadn’t made that choice, I would have had to mess around with non-printing columns for those preliminary calculations and each size dwelling (by number of bedrooms) would have been three tables on separate pages. This would have been a lot more work, and I didn’t have that much time to spare.

Production: Conversions

The entire project was geared toward satisfying my campaign needs. I make no apologies for that. The in-game date is 1986, and the location is the US – specifically, the state of Arkansas (for plot reasons). The system would be naturally adaptable to other times and locations, but that was what I needed it to simulate as a default.

This is a problem that has been addressed for the pulp campaign (set in the mid-1930s, but with financial values matching those of 1930 specifically) on many past occasions.

For consistency, conversions are always handled in a specific way in my games:

Modern to Then:

1. Temporal correction first
2. Regional correction second

Then to Modern:

1. Regional correction first
2. Temporal correction second

Only if I can’t find the appropriate historical conversion information will some compromise be used.

In this case, I was converting numbers from 2021, 2020 and 2017 AUD, to 1986 USD. In the Pulp campaign, it would be to USD from 1930.

I was able to access and download an economic report in spreadsheet format showing the historic conversion rates from Australian Dollars to US Dollars. Historically, this has varied somewhere between 1 AUD buying somewhere close to 50 cents US and a high close to parity (1 dollar US). In more recent times, somewhere between 70 cents and 86 cents US has applied; but by comparing the historical data, I found that at the time in question, the rate was almost 2/3 of a dollar – 66.01 cents, to be exact.

If I had not found this information, I would have had to convert at some assumed rate based on contemporary economics that would have been quite incorrect. If I had used 72 cents, for example, my converted values for properties would have been only 91.667% of what they should have been – an undervaluing of almost 10%. If I had used 75 cents, the error would have been about 12%. These errors might not have been either visible or significant – but why take the chance?

Next, I employed one of my bookmarked resources – the inflation calculator at Calculator.net, which has proven massively useful on a number of occasions, because it works the inflation adjustment in either direction (unlike some others). I fed in $100 US in 2021 and converted it to 1986 dollars, which gave me the percentage to multiply the relevant conversions by. Repeat for the 2020 and 2017 conversions.

For the record:

• 2021 to 1986: × 0.41524
• 2020 to 1986: × 0.42039
• 2017 to 1986: × 0.44778

(divide to go backwards, i.e. from 1986 to 2021 = $ / 0.41524. So a home computer costing $3,499 back then is the equivalent of one costing $8, 426.45 in today’s money. Of course, if you were to buy something of equivalent capabilities, you would be talking a LOT less than that – maybe $84, maybe $8.40!)

With the key values converted to the contemporary target currency, I was able to do a lot of math that I’m not going to bore you with, and start populating my tables, simplifying and generalizing as I went.

Production: Execution

There’s a trick that I learned a long time ago in physics: if you have two independent variables, and you need to assess them, control one axis at a fixed standard value and vary the other one.

Generalization, Size, Quality, & Location (Table 1)

For table 1, I set the ‘typical’ value to 1 for both variables. Using the old maxim of location being more important than size and quality (or anything else), I set the location values to

• Very Desirable = 4
• Desirable = 2
• Typical = 1 (by definition)
• Undesirable = 0.6
• Very Undesirable = 0.2

…and the size and quality values to

• Very Desirable = 2
• Desirable = 1.5
• Typical = 1 (by definition)
• Undesirable = 0.8
• Very Undesirable = 0.4

Simple multiplication let me fill out the rest of table 1.

Generalization, Accompanying land (Table 2)

I then listed all the results as one axis of table 2 (labeled the “SQ,Lo Value”), and eliminated redundant results. Once again, the “1” result (since 1 × 1 = 1) let me assess the relative Land values as

• Lots (more) = 1.5
• More = 1.2
• Normal = 1 (by definition)
• Less = 0.8

I was going to include a 5th option, “none” (with a value of 0.5) but… well, I’ll get back to that.

Again, simple multiplication of these values by the SQ,Lo value let me fill out table 2. I noted that the peak was x12, while the minimum was × 0.06.

Dwelling Price Range

Next. I turned my attention to table 3, which was to provide the other set of inputs into table 4.

I had already set the base value as being that of a three-bedroom house. That went with the known median value of $80,300. All else being equal, I decided that a variation of plus-or-minus $10,000 sounded about right. That gave me a base minimum price of $70,300 and a maximum of $90,300. I could have made it more, or less – I considered both – but most of the volatility in price was going to come from the combined general assessment that I had made and the ‘market forces’ factor to come.

• 0.06 × 10,000 = $600 – so the bottom end of the market came out with a ‘plus or minus’ of just $600.
• 12 × 10,000 = $120,000 – so the top end of the market came out with a ‘plus or minus’ of $120,000.

Again, these values seemed about right, so I didn’t change the $20-000 range.

Copying those values filled out the entire “base min” and “base max” column. I then turned my attention to the adjustment to these low and high values for additional bedrooms, all else being equal.

Averaging the various values my research had provided (after conversion) and rounding to a convenient number gave me an adjustment of $12.500 per additional bedroom to the minimum and $20,800 to the maximum price. Rather than fuss around with diminishing impact on the price as the number of rooms increased, I simply multiplied the difference in bedrooms from the three-bedroom standard by these values to fill out the d1 and d2 columns, respectively. There was more than enough variability coming from other factors to ‘contain’ this error, I had decided.

Adding the resulting d1 to the base min gave the adjusted minimum price for a house of that number of bedrooms; the d2 and base max gave the adjusted maximum price.

Price by # Bedrooms and SQLoLa Value (Table 4, one page per Bedroom count)

This is the real meat of the system. One table for each count of bedrooms, the combined result of the general assessments on the left, and a random roll from 3 to 18 across the top to yield a base value for a specific dwelling.

• I had to start by filling out the left-hand column, again eliminating all the redundant entries.

I mentioned the 5th option on the “Land” variable (for “none”) earlier – I found that there were too many results if I did so to get them onto a single usable table. A compromise for the sake of practicality of use had to be made; I found another way around that for the purchase of Units, Lofts, Townhouses, etc, which I’ll cover in a separate section below

Next, there are the four columns in green, which are intermediate steps used only to generate the rest of the table.

• The “MIN” value is the “adjusted minimum price” for a dwelling of this number of bedrooms (from table 3) multiplied by the SQLoLa value (from table 2).
• The “MAX” value is the “adjusted maximum price” for a dwelling of this number of bedrooms (from table 3) multiplied by the SQLoLa value (from table 2).
• The “RANGE” value is the difference between these.
• The “Range/18” value is the RANGE divided by 18 – so that I can simply multiply by the die roll result.

Which brought me to the heart of the results – multiplying each row’s “range/18” value by successive values and adding the “MIN” result for each row.

Rounding The Corner

When you look at the main part of the results tables, you will notice that – in addition to the background “banding” – some values are in black and some in blue. In fact, they all started as red (to indicate that I hadn’t yet adjusted the rounding) and the colors were applied as those adjustments were made.

This part of the process was inconsistent across the entire process. In fact, I changed rounding and thresholds no less than five times. No, six. Sometimes I went back and corrected, sometimes I made the adjustment only from that table of results forward. Complicating that is that it was quite late in the process that I decided to put the “one bedroom” results into the table at all – originally, I started at “2 bedroom”.

The rounding to apply depended on the result Value. The pattern that I ended up with is:

• $2.25m+ = round to nearest $50 000 = blue
• $1m to $2.249m = round to nearest $25 000 = black
• $500K to $999K = round to nearest $10 000 = blue
• $200K to $499K = round to nearest $1 000 = black
• $100K to $199K = round to nearest $500 = blue
• $30K to $99K = round to nearest $100 = black
• $10K to $29K = round to nearest $50 = blue
• less than $10K = round to nearest $10 = black

At one point, there was an additional tier at the top,

• $3m+ = round to nearest $100 000 = black

and the tier below that was from $2.25m to $2.999m, but the band of results didn’t seem wide enough to justify it, so it got scrapped.

Size Of Urban Community (Table 5)

It may have been possible to incorporate this into the first three tables, but by the time I realized that it was a thing, I had already generated more than 2/3 of the entries for table 3 and they would all have to be redone – and table size was a consideration.

Thus, the decision was made to stick it on as an afterthought. There are seven entries:

• None = 0.5
• Hamlet = 0.7
• Village = 0.85
• Town = 1 (defined as such)
• Small City = 1.5
• Lge City = 2
• Metropolis = 2.5

In retrospect, though, it was a brilliant move to have this as an afterthought because these are perhaps the most contentious values to assign; the population levels are poorly-defined at best and subjective at worst, and could well be different in different campaign settings; and the average impact on pricing is quite dependent on those population levels and their consequent impact on housing prices.

Sidebar: Homes without land

For the sale of units, you can actually consider these to come ‘with a pro-rata share of the land’ on which the block of units sits. Some new blocks of units near me were also sold with an option on some of the shop space on the ground floor of the block. Which means that you can start with the “less land” option on table 2. However, that would only get you a value for a first floor or ground floor unit; every story further up, the value drops. It’s about 8% a floor (but I would use 10% for simplicity) up to 40% and then about half that thereafter, until you get down to about 60% discount.

• Ground Floor = 100% of the result using the ‘less land’ value
• First Floor = same as Ground Floor
• 2nd Floor = 90% of the result using the ‘less land’ value
• 3rd Floor = 80% of the result using the ‘less land’ value
• 4th Floor = 70% of the result using the ‘less land’ value
• 5th Floor = 60% of the result using the ‘less land’ value
• 6th Floor = 55% of the result using the ‘less land’ value
• 7th Floor = 50% of the result using the ‘less land’ value
• 8th Floor = 45% of the result using the ‘less land’ value
• 9th Floor = 40% of the result using the ‘less land’ value
• 10th Floor and above = same as the 9th floor

Townhouses and anything else that doesn’t come with land, but is actually a purchase and not a lease, use the “Normal” land value and then halve the result from table 5.

NB: This part of the process is so new that it isn’t even shown in the instructions that form part of the PDF / spreadsheets! Which is why I’ve labeled it as a sidebar and put the whole thing in bold.

Business Included

This is actually three small tables and a procedure. It does make a couple of important assumptions that I took into account when formulating this part of the process.

The notion is that the potential profitability of the business determines its value, but it divides that profitability up into three different time periods – the first year (immediate profitability), the medium term (two to five years), and the long term (more than 5 years).

It’s in assessing those profitability that the assumptions come into play – the table uses the profitability IF these assumptions are satisfied. If you do something other than what is assumed, you may achieve different results in terms of business success!

The first assumption is that the usage of the rooms is as the new owners intend at the time of purchase. That means that if they intend to repurpose one of the bedrooms towards the business (by making it a home office, for example), the valuation of the overall package (business plus dwelling) should take that into account.

The second assumption only applies to the medium- and long-term assessments, and is that any necessary investment will be made as required – which obviously reduces profitability by spending money.

Each result on the table assesses the profitability during one of the time-frames; the assessments are exactly the same (Very Poor, Poor, Break-even, Good, and Very Good), but these are not equal in value; the long-term tends to dominate, for good or ill, and the medium-term is more important than the short-term.

The process is to make all three assessments, and multiply the three resulting values together. If the total result is less than 1, round the valuation factor up to 1 – as it says on the table, you can always simply close the business and consider the premises simply as a dwelling. You then multiply the dwelling value by the result to get the net price.

The values have been carefully selected to reflect the real-life experience of buying and selling a commercial operation as I understand it – I’m not an expert on this, but pay attention to things when others discuss such matters because you never know when the information will be useful.

It’s worth checking out a couple of the possible combinations, as I did before finalizing these values.

• Short-term break-even, medium-term poor, long-term good – describes a situation in which investment in the medium term yields a good longer-term outcome. 1 × 0.8 × 1.5 = 1.2.
• All three break-even – describes a situation in which the business itself is barely holding its head above water but is either good for a retiree, or well-positioned should market conditions change, or owns intellectual property that in itself is valuable. 1 × 0.9 × 0.7 = 0.63, rounds up to 1. The business adds nothing to the overall value of the property.
• Very Good short-term, Very poor medium-term, very good long-term – the business is profitable at the moment but requires hefty investment in the infrastructure in the medium-term. If you survive doing so, the prospects are excellent for the long-term. 1.4 × 0.5 × 2 = 1.4.
• Same situation but the choice is to run the business into the ground while you can, because the required investment cannot be made for some reason – out of date equipment or whatever. That means that medium-term profitability is good, but long term is very poor. 1.4 × 1.3 × 0.25 = 0.455, rounds up to 1. The business doesn’t add to the value of the property.
• Finally, let’s look at the best possible combination – very good profitability in all three time-frames (clearly indicating some other reason for the sale than profits – retiring, or ill-health, or the owner died, or something). 1.4 × 1.7 × 2 = 4.76. The attached business adds almost 400% to the cost of the building.

It is worth noting, also, that the size of the urban community doesn’t explicitly impact the value of a business, but some businesses require a community of a certain size in order for them to be viable commercial propositions. A 500-bed luxury resort in the middle of nowhere is unlikely to do a roaring trade; a gas station in the same location or a smaller, cheaper, hotel might do quite well. But that means that the current location is implicitly bound up in the assessment of the profitability. A business might be unprofitable now, break-even in the short-term, but likely to thrive in the longer term, simply because the community is growing dramatically and the demand for whatever it is that the business offers is going to increase – eventually.

Usage

I’m going to be fairly brief in this section because I have an example coming up in the next section that will make everything a lot clearer.

At the same time, I want to take the time to add a couple of notes that aren’t entirely clear. My starting point for this section will be the instructions from the PDF, but with the added notes tacked on where relevant; think of them as the “designer’s notes”.

Let’s start here: this is a flowchart describing the process of using the system:

It should not escape attention that the basic process for usage is the same sequence as construction of the system, with one exception (faded on the flowchart): Table 3 is not required unless you are extending the table. And there will be times when you want to do so; that’s why there is a later section devoted to the procedure for doing so. But let’s avoid getting too far ahead of ourselves.

1. Assess Size & Quality (yellow table top left)

Size quite clearly has little or no resemblance to the number of bedrooms. In fact, you can almost consider it to be the size of everything except the bedrooms – almost, but not quite. Don’t over-think these assessments.

2. Assess Location (yellow table top left)

I usually have the advantage of context – I’ll already have some idea of the population of the location, it’s economy, it’s history, and any unsavory attitudes on the part of the locals – and any good neighbors, too. If you have to, you can live without this information, but you’ll find life a lot easier with it – even if you have to invent it out of whole cloth.

3. Cross-reference to get SQLo Value

4. Locate result on Pink Table, far left

Look down the left-hand column of the pink table and find the result.

5. Assess land that comes with property (pink table far left)

This is another general impression but circumstances matter. If we’re talking a farmhouse, the land that is ‘normal’ might be considerable (50 acres or more – 20 hectares for metric users) but in a city it might be 1/4 of an acre. Similarly, the amount needed to qualify for “Lots more than usual” (as opposed to just more than usual) would also change with the circumstances.

If you want to get technical, it’s actually the value of the land that is being assessed, but without putting a dollar value to it – 5000 acres of desert might be needed to get to “Lots” or 500 acres of farmland – but a mansion on 6 acres of land in a city would probably qualify.

Use your descriptive language as the foundation, and that will generally take all these technicalities into consideration without your even thinking about it..

6. Cross reference land with SQLo to get SQLoLa value (pink table, far left)

It’s probably worth jotting this down on a scrap of note paper.

7. Select Blue Table appropriate to number of bedrooms

In the top left of each table you will find the number of bedrooms. It’s worth actually taking a quick glance at table three (to the right of table 1) just to be sure that there’s one of the appropriate size.

If you’re working off an image, you might have to estimate the number of bedrooms. This is where it’s appropriate to use the extra time you saved by being so quick and instinctive in the earlier steps.

8. Locate matching SQLoLa Value

Once you’ve found the right table, go down the left hand column to find the value from table two that matches.

9. Roll 3d6 (Optional: 3d6 & d4, see below)

    9a. For high sentimental value properties or especially skilled salespeople, use 3d6 & d4, as follows:

    a. Roll all four dice

    b. Select the d6 with the lowest showing value.

    c. Compare with the result showing on the d4.

    d. Discard whichever of the two is the lower.

    e. Read the total of the remaining dice as though they were 3d6.

It works out that exactly half the time, this results in an improvement to the total of at least 1. More than 10.5% of the time, you will get an improvement of three! This makes a significant improvement to the value of the dwelling.

10. Cross-reference to get property base asking price

Find the “3d6” result column that the roll has indicated and follow it down until you get to the row that contains the SQLoLa value that you determined earlier. Or track across from that value until you find the indicated column.

Jot down the resulting value.

(Okay, it’s bound to come up and this my last chance to explain it. SQLoLa stands for “Size, Quality, Location, Land”)

11. Assess Size Of Urban Community (orange table, page 1)

This is where the context information that I mentioned previously becomes really essential. Remember that these ratings are according to the standards of your game setting. A “Town” in 1986 (or 2021 for that matter) is something quite different from the meaning of 1686, which is different to the meaning of 1286.

12. Multiply Community Size Factor by base asking price

Multiply the factor that you get from the orange table by the price that you have written down. Write down the result if it’s different, and cross out the old price so that you don’t get confused.

If there is no business, skip steps 13 and 14.

13. If there is a business attached to the property, assess Business Factor (Purple table, page 1)

I’ve already discussed how this works, earlier in the article.

14. Multiply current asking price by business factor (if any)

Multiply the business factor by the current price you have written down. If it’s different, write down the new answer and cross out the old one.

15. Result is the FINAL ASKING PRICE. Most sales can be settled for 90% of this.

I’ve put the meaning of the result in capitals because it’s important. If a PC negotiates, they may get the acceptable price down to 90, 85, even 80% of the asking price – but if they fail, it could go up 10, 15, even 20%.

It’s never enough simply to roll unless its a private sale. Realtors have enough experience and expertise that the majority of ploys won’t work on them. This should be roleplayed and the GM should determine from the strength of the roleplay what result this represents – if he’s feeling generous, it might be a blended roll (half rolled and half from roleplay).

The more of a back-and-forth you can make this, the better it will be. It’s very rare in real life, when negotiating a sale of this magnitude, for someone to say “$X and that’s my final offer, take it or leave it” – at least right off the bat, it is. You might get to that point after going back-and-forth for a while. Remember that the salesman’s commission is usually a percentage of the sale price, so they have a vested interest in pushing that price up.

16. If Realtor’s fees etc are relevant, increase price 20%.

I’ve said 20%, but in some cases it may be only 10%, in others, 25%. This often depends on a whole range of factors – how long the property has been on the market, how many times the Realtor has tried without success to sell it (costing him time and effort, and making him more likely to accept a lower commission just to get it off his books), his mood on the day, pressure from the people he’s representing, whether or not he thinks the buyers will fit in around here, and many more. Again, use your gut instincts to assess the situation and translate into an appropriate commission percentage.

In most (but not necessarily all) jurisdictions, this amount gets added on the top of the agreed price, something that has caught a lot of buyers out in the past. If that’s not the case, you may need to pre-load this into the asking price before negotiations begin.

There may also be land taxes or sales taxes (or whatever) to take into account. These are generally assumed to be factored into the asking price, but if for some reason you don’t think that they would be, you should explicitly define how much they are and add that to the asking price as well.

In theory, the Realtor’s fees would exclude any such increase, but that’s too much effort for not enough gain in accuracy – the variables involved are more than enough to cover this minor discrepancy.

There may also be X-factors that I haven’t thought of, and that only affect this specific property. If a place has a reputation for being haunted, or the land is contaminated, or it has its own private airstrip, or anything else you can think of, be sure to add something to the asking price to cover that additional value.

Example

Here’s a picture of exactly the sort of dwelling that the PCs are looking for.

So let’s evaluate this place and how much – in 1986 – the system thinks it would cost to buy.

1. Assess Size & Quality (yellow table top left)

This is a nice place, and a fair size. It’s not a huge mansion, but it’s clearly bigger than average. I rate is as desirable.

2. Assess Location (yellow table top left)

It looks like a nice location but the grass is a little dry – so better than ‘typical’ but not top of the tree. That rates it as desirable on this axis, too.

3. Cross-reference to get SQLo Value

The Desirable-Desirable match gives a SQLo of 3.

4. Locate result on Pink Table, far left

Five rows down, between the 2 and the 3.2.

5. Assess land that comes with property (pink table far left)

The environment looks suburban. There is another house visible at the top of the hill in the background (just barely), so there is a back yard of some size. However, not all of it necessarily belongs to this property – in the absence of a fence-line, the assumption has to be that half of the back yard belongs to this house. Now, the house is larger than most, and it has a reasonable front yard as well, so it clearly has more than is usual – but it doesn’t have a whole estate. So that leaves it in the ‘more’ category and not the “lots more’.

6. Cross reference land with SQLo to get SQLoLa value (pink table, far left)

The intersection of “More land” and an SQ,Lo of 3 gives an SQLoLa of 3.6.

7. Select Blue Table appropriate to number of bedrooms

Next, I need to estimate the number of bedrooms. Assuming that they are all on the second story, I count two bays of windows on the side and one at the front left. That’s three visible bedrooms, and it’s a safe bet that there are one or two – but probably not three – out of sight. That gives a total count of 4 or 5 bedrooms. Since there might be a guest room on the ground floor, I’ll choose the higher of the two values as most probable.

A quick check of the blue table at the center top of page 1 confirms what I already knew – 5 bedrooms is one of the tables that I have generated. I would expect to find it on page 6 of the PDF… and there it is.

8. Locate matching SQLoLa Value

I’m looking for a SQLoLa value of 3.6 down the left-hand column – and about 12 rows down, there it is. It assigns a Min of $343,080 and a Max of $474,840. That’s a range of $131,760, and 1/18th of that is $7,320.00.

9. Roll 3d6 (Optional: 3d6 & d4, see below)

    9a. For high sentimental value properties or especially skilled salespeople, use 3d6 & d4, as follows:

    a. Roll all four dice

    b. Select the d6 with the lowest showing value.

    c. Compare with the result showing on the d4.

    d. Discard whichever of the two is the lower.

    e. Read the total of the remaining dice as though they were 3d6.

This place looks new, at least at the front – the rear looks older. I don’t see it as having a huge amount of sentimental value to the current owners; on the contrary, I suspect that they have bought it, renovated it, and are now looking to flip it for a profit and move on to another project. A fast sale would be preferable to getting the biggest bang for their buck, and any Realtor would be given instructions to that effect. So that means that the skill of any such would not be directed toward squeezing the last dollar of purchase price from the sale. Hence, no d4.

I roll 3d6 and get a result of eight.

10. Cross-reference to get property base asking price

Because I’m only using half the screen to view the PDF (the document containing the article is occupying the other half) this is just a little trickier than it would be, but it’s just a matter of scrolling up, down, left, and right, until I can see both the row and column at the same time. If I had rolled higher, I might have needed to zoom out a bit, but that wasn’t quite necessary. The base asking price is $402,000.

11. Assess Size Of Urban Community (orange table, page 1)

The urban community – I’ve already said suburban. I have seen communities with homes of this type in towns and small cities; in desirable suburbs, you might also find them in large cities, but I think you would get better lawns and garden care in that case. Right away, then, I’m down to two possibilities.

I’m leaning about 66-33 toward a small city, but I think I’ll step outside the system and compromise.

2/3 × 1.5 = 1; 1/3 × 1 = 1/3; so the urban community size value that I’m going to use is 1.33, a town on its way to becoming a 2nd-class city.

12. Multiply Community Size Factor by base asking price

1.33 × $402,000 = $534,660.

There’s no business involved, so I skip steps 13 and 14.

15. Result is the FINAL ASKING PRICE. Most sales can be settled for 90% of this.

The asking price is $534,660 – but the owners are going to be minded to settle for 85% of that for a fast sale, as already indicated.

85% of that asking price is $454,461. Call it $455,000.

16. If Realtor’s fees etc are relevant, increase price 20%.

Agent’s fees would raise the price a bit.

But the seller wants to sell quickly, and has promised to pay 5% of the fees out of his share if the realty can sell the house in the next few weeks. To encourage this, the Realtor will drop his percentage on the top to 10%, giving him a total of 15% of the purchase price.

There will also be a 10% land tax, adding $45,000 to the price.

But if the PCs bargain well, there’s a bit of wiggle room left – the 85% could drop to 80%, about $23,000, and everyone would be happy.

Time to total things up:

$455,000 + $45,000 = $500,000; add 10% Realtor’s fees to get $550,000. But the Realtor would probably accept $527,000 as a final settlement if the PCs bargain well.

It seems a little on the high side to me, but not too far off the mark.

There would be little public transport access, and there might be limited public amenities nearby – that could drop the price another $75,000 or so.

$425,000, down to $402,000 if the PCs do well.

That’s for a 5-bedroom, 3-bathroom house, luxurious interior, dining room, kitchen, maybe a swimming pool out back, two-car garage, sitting room, marble staircase, library, games room, fully decorated.

And that sounds like a reasonable price to me.

Extension

What if the number of bedrooms we want isn’t one of the ones that I have pre-worked – what if we need to extend the system?

Tables 1, 2, 5, and 6 don’t need to change. We need a new row in table 3, and to then turn that into a new entry of table 4.

But there’s no need to do a full table – just to do the parts that we actually need. The existing set of tables are robust enough to cope with most challenges. Which means following the same process as described above until we can go no further.

I’m not going to spell out the parts that are covered by the example above; instead, I’ll provide a very synopsized account until we get to ‘the interesting bit’.

The basic concept: a 25-room hotel in a small community of perhaps 250 people (unless there are exigent circumstances, that 10-to-1 ratio is a reasonable rule of thumb for hotel size; in a more remote community like the one I grew up in, the ratio is larger, about 100-to-1).

• Size & Quality: Typical.
• Location: Undesirable (it’s not on the main thoroughfare through the community, it’s off on a side street some distance away).
• SQ,Lo value 0.6.
• Land: Normal.
• SQLoLa value 0.6.
• 25 rooms is not on table 3.

So that’s where the real work has to start – when the process itself identifies the need to extend the system. But we only need to produce data for SQLoLa of 0.6. And, in fact, we can skip ahead slightly further and consider the die roll – Sentimental value isn’t a factor, but the most skilled salesmen are more likely to get this commission, so let’s go for the d4 option.

Rolling 3d6 & a d4: 2, 4, 4, 3. The 3 replaces the 2, for a total of 11.

That means that we don’t need to do the full table, either – just the entry for that particular roll.

Number of bedrooms

We know the hotel has 25 rooms. But I also want to include a small two-bedroom manager’s residence on the side, raising the total to 27.

d1 per room

This is 12,500 per room, or 25 × 12,500 – but it’s reasonable to apply one of the neglected pieces of research and devalue the rooms somewhat at this point. Let’s use $10,000 per room.

d1 = $10,000.

d2 per room

This is nominally $20,800 per room, but these are to be fairly bare-bones hotel rooms. The value has to be more than the $10,000 we used for d1, so it will be somewhere between that and the usual. Call it $12,000 a room. But we also need to note the fact that some of the facilities need to be more extensive than would be usual in a home – we’re talking a commercial kitchen, and perhaps a restaurant / dining room, and maybe a more substantial entertainment area, plus a spa, a reception, and a gymnasium. How much would those cost to build? $250,000? $350,000? Let’s use the latter, and load a one-25th share of that onto the d2 value (the two bedrooms for the manager’s residence should get the full standard value, which is why the 25 is still the appropriate divisor).

$350,000 / 25 = $14,000.

$12,000 + $14,000 = $26,000.

d2 = (25 × $26,000 + 2 × $20,800) / 27 = ($650,000 + $41,600) / 27 = $691,600 / 27 = $25615 (rounding for convenience).

Adj Min

The base min and base max are unchanged at $70,300 and $90,300, respectively. So we can move straight onto the Adjusted values.

Adj Min = $70,300 + 27 × $10,000 = $70,300 + $270,000 = $340,300.

Adj Max

Adj Max = $90,300 + 27 × $25615 = $90,300 + $691,605 = $781,905.

That completes the entry that’s “missing” from table 3. We can now move on to table 4, and calculate the Green Column values.

MIN

Our SQLoLa value is 0.6.

MIN = AdjMin × SQLoLa = $340,300 × 0.6 = $204,180.

MAX

MAX = AdjMax × SQLoLa = $781,905 × 0.6 = $469,143.

RANGE

Range = MAX – MIN = $469,143 – $204,180 = $264,963.

Range/18

Range/18 = $264,963 / 18 = $14,720.17 (to two decimal places).

Which takes us to the main part of the table. We only need the value for a roll of 11.

Base Asking Price

Base Asking Price = MIN + Roll × (Range/18) = $204,180 + 11 × $14,720.17 = $204,180 + $161,921.87 = $366,101.87

Rounding

In the 200K-499K range, round to the nearest $1000.

Rounded Base Asking Price = $366,000.

Until we get to valuing this hotel as a business, the rest of this process is just like the previous example, so it’s back to the summarized-synopsis format for a bit:

• Size of the community – I grew up in a town of 2000 people, but in US terms it would be a second-class city. Most of the surrounding communities were considerably smaller, so I’ve seen several examples on which to judge this. To me, a hamlet has less than 100 urban residents, and maybe 400 all told including local farmers. So, a community of 250 urban residents is somewhere in between that and a town – by definition, a village. But that’s in real life – in a fantasy setting, urban populations might be smaller, and this might be a fully-fledged town. But that’s getting a bit ahead of myself in terms of this article, so let’s stay with the Village assessment.
• That yields a community value of 0.85.
• So the adjusted asking price = 0.85 × $366,000 = $311,100.

Which brings us to assessing the viability of this operation as a business. We didn’t have to do that in the previous example, so let’s examine these steps more thoroughly.

Short-term profitability

If this community is on a major interstate highway, or near a tourist attraction, then its size might be reasonable relative to the community population. Under any other circumstance, it’s probably too large by about half or even two-thirds.

That unresolved question comes into sharp focus when we start assessing the profitability of the business. Since I’m making this example up, more-or-less as I go, any of these scenarios can be valid – but, to be honest, anyone who contemplated building a hotel of this size without at least one of those traffic-generating incentives, especially in a relatively out-of-the-way location, would be laughed out of the bank whose money they wanted to use to finance the construction.

It doesn’t matter which market advantage the business enjoys – this might be a regional hub for a rail network, and so need to provide accommodations for railroad staff all year round, or their bread-and-butter might be tourism, or they might have some other trick up their sleeves; the specifics aren’t important, what matters is that the 10-to-1 rooms to population ratio is justified by this factor.

That means that the short-term profitability is going to be good or very good. Unable to pick between those choices on this limited information, I’ll split the difference and assign a 1.3 short-term profitability value.

Medium-term profitability

There are two possible scenarios: either increasing maintenance costs will start eating into profits in the medium term, or they won’t.

That intersects with another pair of scenarios: either the hotel will have been a big success, attracting one or more rival operations, or it will have been a moderate success, and be hostage to changing market conditions. Little stays the same forever, and if they are a hostage to the fortunes of some entity outside their control, sooner or later, that status will turn around and bite them.

There is every reason to suspect that medium-term profitability will drop one-to-two steps relative to the short-term starting point. If the initial profitability was Good, that yields Poor or Break Even; if it was very good, it downgrades it to Good or Break-Even.

At first, it might seem that the one value in common to both – Break-Even – should be chosen, but not so fast! If initial profitability was only Good, one of the major downward pressures on profitability (rivals) goes away, making Break-Even more likely, and possibly even keeping things in the Good column. If the initial profitability was Very Good, there’s more downward pressure – but the adjustment happens from a higher starting point, so Break-Even or Good are the likely results.

So this time, I will split the difference between Break-Even and Good, and assign a medium-term value of 1.1.

Long-term profitability

The longer view is not so rosy. Those pressures on profitability will only increase with time, and eventually the inevitable will happen – rivals or market collapse. Unless something can be done in the way of generating a second string to their marketing bow, the long-term profitability prospects are Poor.

If the present owners, or the town, have a plan, it doesn’t matter whether or not the PCs think it will work; it will indicate that something can be put in place to overcome the problem, elevating the long-term forecast to Break-Even at the very least. How much better than that it might be does depend on the success of whatever plans to confront the problem are executed, though.

It’s possible that by luring a new major employer to the region, or developing a new industry to support the community, the outlook long-term could even be Good.

So this time I’m going to split the difference between Poor and Good, and assign the long-term value to 1.

Combining Values

1.3 × 1.1 × 1 = 1.43.

This is more than 1, so there is no rounding required.

Applying The Business Valuation

1.43 × Asking Price = 1.43 × $311,100 = $444,873.

With the profitability of the Hotel factored in, it has become clear why the current owners are probably wanting to sell – the business will never be as attractive a proposition as it is right now. This is undoubtedly the best time to sell.

This isn’t just a commitment to buying a business – it’s a commitment to local government and local politics, to becoming an involved and engaged civic leader. This is a defining point in the campaign, in other words.

If the GM wants to make this an attractive option because he can see interesting plotlines arising from it, its at this point that he can intervene to do so. If he thinks this will get in the way of what he wants to achieve in the campaign, he can now make choices that will discourage the PCs.

Personally, I like situations like this because ideas are already suggesting themselves to me – suppose an unsavory weapons manufacturer were to be persuaded to establish an R&D facility in the vicinity, someone who covertly supports enemies of the PCs? Making them dependent on the local presence of an enemy offers plenty of plot scope. And I always like giving the PCs things to do outside of adventuring. So I’m more likely to want to encourage this as an option.

The rest of the process is straightforward, the same as in the previous example. Just to finish things off, let’s run through it quickly:

• Most property purchases can be completed for 90% of the asking price. Depending on circumstances, this could drop to 85% or rise to 95%. The seller is motivated to sell now but won’t want to lose much of the profitability of the sale – so I’ll set their willingness to budge to a mere 95%. So that’s $423,000 (to the nearest thousand), instead of $445,000, or a $22,000 discount.
• Sales Tax, Legal fees, etc, totaling 8% (the community has an interest in making the sale attractive) adds $35,600. Adding that to the $445K gives $480,600.
• Realtor’s Fees – If the Realtor is convinced that the new owners will stick around and invest in the community, he will benefit more in the long run by taking a smaller commission this time around. If he’s nearing retirement, or isn’t convinced, or is simply too short-sighted, he’s more likely to charge big. This is where I can shade the attractiveness of the proposition for the campaign’s benefit, or make it look more discouraging. I’ll set the two choices at +7% and +18%, respectively. If the latter, the unscrupulous Realtor will also use the value after sales tax instead of the lower value that he should use. So that’s either an additional $31,150, or an additional $86,500 – grand totals of $511,750 or $567,100, with possible discount of $22,000.

Adaption

It’s very easy to adapt these results to different campaigns, eras, and genres – you simply need to work out a currency conversion.

There are a lot of factors that you can take into account – material scarcity and expense, transport costs, labor costs, automata / slave labor, economics, currency standards, and more – but really, why bother?

Pick a number that feels about right and be done with it. If you can, use some equivalent property from the game system that you are importing your results into.

For example, you might decide that 260,000 gp is the right price for buying a five-bedroom home in your fantasy campaign. Or that 1.25 million gold would buy a 25-room keep. Once you have a conversion factor, you can use the system at will just by adding a step to the end of the process.

Or, perhaps you want to use the price of a Saturn-5 and Apollo capsule as a three-bedroom house (open plan, obviously). Thus you would be able to calculate the construction costs of a 4-man variant, with four times the rockets, for a Mars mission. You could even use the link provided earlier to adjust 1969 prices to 1990 or whenever.

Sidebar: beyond now

It’s important, when projecting values beyond now, that you remember that inflation is a compounding event. The simplest method is to go back in time as many years as you have to go forward – it won’t be very accurate but will be so much as easier. Or you can decide what the overall inflation rate will be each year from now until whenever and raise it to the power of the number of years. Beware – small differences will accumulate to a big difference.

For example, fifty years of 2.05% inflation is 1.0205 ^ 50 = × 2.758357.
Fifty years of 2.1% inflation is 1.021 ^ 50 = × 2.82675.
Multiplied by $500,000, those are $1,379,178.50 and $1,413,375 respectively – a difference of $34,196.50. And that’s an almost minuscule difference!

It’s also an improbably low value.

• $500,000 from 1970 is equivalent to almost $3.49 million 2020 dollars.
• $500,000 from 1920 is equivalent to a little over $1 million 1970 dollars – or $7,461,982.65 dollars in 2020.

Around 2.74% is closer to reality – but inflation is expected to spike as economies come out of Covid restrictions, and stay high for quite a few years because of the debts various governments have accumulated while combating the pandemic.

One more example: Let’s say that your Sci-fi game lists a freighter with a 5-man (PC) crew as costing (plucks a number out of the air) 120,000 credits. Call that a standard 5-bedroom house (Captain’s quarters, two crew quarters for 2 PCs each, and two passenger cabins). Using this system, you can work out a 1986-dollar equivalent – and that conversion factor will let you use the system to work out how much a 25000-berth colony ship will cost, if that’s something you need that the game resources don’t tell you. Or a larger space yacht. Or a 10-crew freighter, or two-man explorer.

All the other complexities – computer systems, ship’s weapons, spacecraft hulls, etc – melt away. If you really need to factor them in, you can do it as percentage increases relative to the base model.

Lunar Colonies, Deep Space Habitats, Manned Space Telescopes, Wooden Sailing ships, log cabins, secret underground military bases – they’re all at your notepad.

Just remember, write down any conversion factors you determine so that you don’t have to repeat the work the next time you need them.

This system won’t solve all your problems – but it will give you the tools you need to start solving them yourself. It’s one less thing that you have to worry about.

Finished at last – this is only about 90 minutes late! Enjoy :)

Anytime a product with the combined talents of multiple industry heavy-hitters like Ed Greenwood and Skip Williams comes onto your horizon, you pay attention.

When that product made its funding targets in just 2 1/2 hours, you pay even closer attention. Clearly, the stars are aligning.

And when stretch goal after stretch goal get smashed, and the product offers incredible value for money, you start doing things that you otherwise would not – like previewing this article a week ahead of time just to warn people to pump up their finances.

The “product” in question (you’ll understand the use of inverted commas by the end of this article) is called Tanares.

What is Tanares?

This is a much more complicated question than it first appears, because Tanares is so BIG and so customizable.

• Tanares is a campaign setting comprising two volumes – one for players and one for GMs. And,
• Tanares is a set of adventures set in that campaign setting. A third volume! And,
• Tanares is a series of Miniatures (some of them about the same height as the sourcebooks, which appear to be standard sized)! And,
• Tanares is a board game! And,
• Tanares is a set of epic maps! And,
• Tanares is a set of simplified variations on the standard character classes designed to facilitate the introduction of new players to 5e D&D! And,
• Tanares is a set of new character classes (with extensive customization options) and new races which you can integrate into your own campaign worlds! And,
• Tanares is a set of new creatures for your PCs to encounter, complete with everything you need to bring them to life.
• Tanares is a system permitting solo, GM-less play!

….and that’s just scratching the surface!

There’s a lot there to dig into. Let’s start with…

The Three Books

There are three sourcebooks at the core of Tanares, from an RPG perspective (plus a fourth unlocked as a stretch goal).

Well, that’s how the Kickstarter campaign introduces the three books. So let’s dig a little deeper:

The Players Book

The first of the three books is the Player’s Guide. This includes a number of potentially interesting items in addition to the character classes and races already mentioned (and which I’ll look at in a little more detail later).

Team Play

The idea of a group of individuals forming a collective identity which unlocks new game dynamics – benefits, vulnerabilities, and so on – has been at the fringes of RPGs practically from day. It started the day an adventuring party first gave themselves a name, and in the process, began to establish a collective identity for themselves. That was either in the early 80s, or even earlier.

It’s something that I touched on in my Fumanor campaign, where I looked at the notion of state-sponsored benefits for those adventurers who registered as a group – which enabled the state to throw problems to groups who seemed best-fitted to solve them, and who were at loose ends. In truth, the economy was increasingly dependent on the infusions of wealth brought in from those who looted the treasures of the former civilizations, and this measure was reflective of the fact.

But those ideas only scratched the surface of the potential in that particular fringe; there’s a scarcity of detail in the preview (understandable since there’s so much to get through), but the implication is that there are specific benefits and consequences to be embedded within the game mechanics for things like cooperative actions.

Again, Fumanor touched on those, too – there were certain Feats that gave an advantage based on the number of allies who also had that Feat. It wasn’t a linear progression (I used a Fibonacci sequence) so that the numbers didn’t get completely out of hand, but it made a Goblin Horde something truly terrifying. But I always knew that there was a lot more potential to be unlocked in the broader concepts, and – at the very least – these would seem to be a step forwards toward achieving that potential.

New Spells, Items, Feats

These are practically ubiquitous in game supplements. While there may be some interesting new ideas, and some integration with the other new elements, this is probably the most ho-hum ingredient unless they’ve been deployed well.

What do I mean by that? If they’ve been used to confer a unique flavor and set of abilities to new classes and creatures and the like, and have been properly play-tested, they could be an asset because they would enhance the more directly-interesting content.

In isolation, these would only be noteworthy if they were absent. if effectively combined with the other content, and I have no reason not to expect that, then they could be as important a development in game design as giving each class its own unique spell list.

Guidance on Hunting Dragons (and, for the brave, Breeding Drakes)

I like the idea of new adventurers learning techniques from the old hands, and always have, but it’s always been difficult to implement without impacting on player freedoms. “This is the right way, the effective way” carries a strong flavor of “This is the ONLY way”.

So I’ve only ever partially succeeded at implementing this within my own campaigns through the concept of Mentors who occasionally set tests and training sessions for their Trainees, and who were otherwise available to dispense sage advice, background information, and flavor text on demand.

That means that I would be as interested in how this section is being done, from a meta-perspective, as by the intriguing content itself.

Headquarters: creation, maintenance, and upgrading

I’ve maintained for a long time now that D&D missed a bet when they threw out the idea of PCs building Strongholds when they advanced in levels – I think that happened with 3e.

An adventuring group constructing and gradually improving a safe base of operations simply seems so logical that it almost goes without saying – but full expression of the concept has had to wait on the development of the party-unified “Teamwork” concepts that I’ve already expressed interest in.

Since I have high hopes that the new mechanics in Tanares clears that stumbling block, it can only be hoped that this is an expression of what is possible once you have done so! All being well, the last hurdle has been cleared to make that logical development a formalized one.

Aerial Combat

For some reason, this has always been really hard to do in an RPG. Perhaps because techniques are dependent on outside-game infrastructure, like elevated platforms for minis, perhaps because the standard game mechanics tend to be two-dimensional in thinking because that’s so much simpler, perhaps for some other reason.

For that reason, I frequently integrate Board Games that successfully model dogfights with reasonable game-play, like Blue Max, into my RPG superstructure. Often, I won’t present full game mechanics integration, but use them for a ‘restricted look-and-feel’ for the combat.

If Tanares has truly cracked the Aerial Combat In RPGs nut, that alone would make it groundbreaking. Even if their solution is less than perfect, it would still be a significant contribution to the art of RPG design.

PvP Arena play

If there’s one addition to the game mechanics that I’m not so sure of, this is it. These mechanics could be absolutely brilliant, adding a new chapter to the standards of the Industry, pointing the way to integration with the CCG locomotive that could invigorate both. Or they could be a superfluous add-on. I can’t tell without reading the entire volume – so, until I do, I would employ wary interest in these, nothing more.

On the other hand, I can see how some groups would be strengthened by a means of settling PvP grievances in-game. So, for some, these might be the greatest thing since sliced Lembas.

The Campaign Sourcebook

The second volume is the Campaign Sourcebook. Tanares is described as a High-Fantasy setting, a “fragmented world in constant change.” Before a campaign begins, the GM can choose which “Avatar Dragons” are alive or dead (in any combination), which yields substantial changes to “the history, landscape, culture, and politics of the world.”

Very clever – random initial conditions have been a feature of a number of board games over the years, and this is adapts the concept to RPG Campaign generation.

But there’s content promised that could easily extend beyond this one milieu of RPG campaigns, and that would be of interest to most GMs out there (even some that don’t GM 5e!)

Plot Hooks & Adventure Ideas

Kudos for separating the two! A plot can extend through multiple adventures – I generally refer to these as “plot arcs”, a source of continuity that helps bind a campaign together.

Depending on how you read it, there can be over a thousand or ‘merely’ something approaching that number (with the balance being the adventure ideas and the content from the section below). When you think about the “Fragmented Reality” and the meta-level mechanics for campaign generation, this number clarifies into a new perspective, however: If there are (say) 5 special Avatar Dragons, each of which has two possible statuses in any given campaign, that gives 32 possible combinations; if 6, it yields 64. Thirty plot seeds for each of the former, or 20 of the latter, gets us close to that thousand in total.

Even so, this is an incredibly useful campaign creation tool. If you can ‘map’ any given campaign to just one of these configurations, however vaguely, these lists would become examples of the plots that would work in that campaign setting. And you can always filch and adapt ideas that don’t fit especially strongly for your own purposes.

Organizations & Locations

More readily adaptable to other game settings, you can never have too many interesting locations at your fingertips, and having interesting organizations to seed into your game world is almost as useful.

Eleven Detailed Provinces

Even if you aren’t interested (right now) in using Tanares directly as a campaign foundation, how these are organized can be as useful when applied to other campaigns.

And that’s without extracting contents from those detailed provinces for your own use: Tanares promises “hundreds of cities and points of interest”, plus sites of “extreme geography, like those that hide an elemental nexus, serve as an Avatar Dragon’s lair, or were ravished by a Malrokian Curse”.

The Penumbral Plane

A penumbra is the partially-shaded outer region of the shadow cast by an opaque object or a peripheral or indeterminate area or group. What that means in respect of “The Penumbral Plane” remains to be seen – does the name refer to the inhabitants, lurking on the edge of darkness? Or to the nature of the plane itself? Or both?

Either way, such names never fail to bring to mind Cthulhu and the works of Lovecraft and the lurking horrors on the fringes of reality that “Man is not meant to know”.

Unique new monsters ‘with unprecedented features’

Almost as ubiquitous as New Spells, but again, you can never have too many good ideas to draw upon. The “unprecedented features’ is both intriguing and worrying, because creatures are never playtested as thoroughly as PC-mechanics and never can be.

Let’s say (in a simplified world) that a playtest involves six encounters – it’s extremely unlikely that those six would be with the same type of creatures. Which would mean that the PC mechanics got six times the workout that each of the creatures did.

Scale it up: A playtest involves 600 encounters, over a campaign-length time frame. Now, it’s more likely that some creatures have come up multiple times – perhaps 10 or 20 times for common creatures, perhaps half-a-dozen times for uncommon creatures, and maybe only once or twice for significant but rare encounters (and that because plot manipulates the odds, or should). That gives ratios of 30-60 times (common), 100 times (uncommon), and 300-600 times (rare) for the ratio of PC testing relative to creature testing.

Fortunately, all these creatures don’t exist in isolation; what you learn from one, you can often apply to many or all others. This mitigates those ratios massively, maybe down to a ratio of two or three.

But, “unique features”. These restrict the applicability of those mitigations; and there’s only so much that you can do to compensate with additional playtesting.

The same is true of every creature supplement out there, of course, to at least some extent. That doesn’t make the resulting creatures any less interesting. But it is – or should be – a source of trepidation for GMs.

Rules for interesting travel (through space or time)

It’s about time that this element of traditional RPGs got a face-lift. Random encounter tables have been around forever, in essentially unchanged form. So if there’s a new approach spelled out in Tanares, it’s potentially as interesting and significant as the Aerial Combat rules. And a good place from which to move on to the third of the sourcebooks.

The Adventures Sourcebook

“Adventure In The Realms Of Madness” is more of a campaign than an adventure.

“When the ruins of the most powerful kingdom in history become open for exploration, player characters become involved in a frenetic treasure hunt” – that leads them to “the world’s deepest secrets” and “unique challenges” and “even a murder investigation followed by a trial,” and there’s a prison break in there somewhere, too, along with “surprising twists, portals, potent treasures and artifacts and dragon encounters.”

This isn’t a standalone product; you need both the other volumes to use it.

Plot Structure

The plot is described as a “branching, nonlinear story for characters of levels 3 to 12.”

There’s a rich background with many intriguing agents and moving parts.”

Which means that I would be as interested in how it’s all put together as I am in the actual content. There’s always another lesson to learn in the art of campaign and adventure design!

Dungeons

Not only are there (obviously) multiple dungeons in a logical framework that justifies their existence, you can add a dozen double-sided dungeon battle-mats specifically designed for this adventure (one for each chapter of the ‘adventure’).

But these aren’t just any battle-mats – these are full A1 poster-sized maps!

And you can add to that a whole lot of minis that take the environment into the third dimension. Eight of these form the basic “Adventure pack” of minis (some of them with multiple minis) and at least another six that have been unlocked as stretch goals.

While the minis can no doubt be repurposed, the notion of figures and dungeon dressings bespoke to this particular set of dungeons somehow elevates both to a whole new level of awesome.

New Races

There are four new races presented in Tanares.

Tak’Maku

The Tak’Maku sound like Vulcans reinvented for a D&D universe – minus the pointed ears. If anything, the artwork makes them look more like Thanos.

Described as seeking “a balanced, holistic life”, members of this race are “logical, literal,” and “rational”, with innate engineering skills that make available new gadgets and moving cities.

Gloomfolk

Drowlike in appearance, these are a “centaur-like scorpion species” which immediately brings to mind The Scorpion King from the second movie in the Mummy franchise.

They are described as having “a knack for improvisation” that enables them to thrive in chaos, they are experts with special poisons and venoms and in dwelling on the Penumbral Plane in communities that are “half-here, half-there.”

This seems to tie directly back to the concept of the Penumbral Plane itself, and makes this an extremely interesting choice on offer as a PC race.

Cirrus

Powder-blue skin characterizes the appearance of this race, while the masks and hoods somehow recall a blending of Middle-eastern desert cultures and Asian influences, posing interesting questions about their culture.

The write-up offered on the Kickstarter locates this race’s homes high in the mountains, which reminds me of another blue-skinned species in D&D – Frost Giants. But these are definitely not the same – a featured trait of the species are their wings (which grant full flight at 9th level) and voice-related powers including a power of Suggestion.

They are also described as inheriting both Angelic and Demonic features, and being extremely long-lived (perhaps near-immortal?), a blend that can be hard to achieve conceptually.

This race could be all over the place in concept, but if some central idea can bind these disparate elements together, they could be extremely interesting to explore, both as a player and as a GM.

Kemet

“Drow with glowing eyes” was my first reaction to the artwork, but then I took a closer look at the female example, whose skin is more pale and white.

The write-up posits several intriguing points that seem better suited to a class than to a species – “Deeply tied to portals and to the study of death and the occult” – it would be very interesting to me to see how such features impact upon a broader society as opposed to individuals.

“Part of this species is actually an Elven subspecies, while another branch lost its former fey ancestry and became an entirely new species” – more originality in the entire concept of two subspecies splitting off from different species to form branches of an entirely new species. Or it could be that the language has been mangled with some entirely new and inappropriate interpretation of the name – but, given the quality of the people in back of Tanares, what might otherwise be a leading theory becomes quite unlikely in comparison to some high-concept creativity.

They enjoy “a unique relationship” with their souls, which enables them to employ new traits – this reminds me extremely forcefully of one of my earliest posts here at Campaign Mastery, A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs, which advocates asking ‘the big questions’ when you are creating a campaign and integrating the answers that apply to that specific campaign with your adventuring, exploring the consequences in your plotlines. The theory is that this not only confers uniqueness on the campaign but a cohesiveness that binds the events within the campaign together into a larger whole. The opening paragraph of the article explains the reasons for that connection; it reads,

What exactly is the soul? No, I’m not getting all existential and metaphysical on you, I’m asking the question objectively and literally. You see, one of my D&D campaigns has this question of the nature of the soul as one of its key themes. More, it states that the answer is different for each race, and that this is the fundamental distinction between Elves and Humans and Dwarves and the other sentient species that inhabit the game world.

It is into that context that I interpret what’s been provided about the undying Kemet in Tanares, whose very existence poses some of those “Big Questions” – and whose nature may very well hint at some answers within this particular game setting.

Classes

Classes in Tanares come in three varieties of content. There are simplified introductory classes, there are new classes, and there are new sub-classes.

Simplified Classes

There are four of these: A simplified Wizard (the Mage), a simplified Barbarian (the Juggernaut), a simplified Rogue (the Scoundrel), and a simplified Cleric (the Shaman). Three of these have figurines in the “Mystical Pack”, the Juggernaut has a figurine in the “Villains Pack”.

In the first and last of these, the complexities that have predominantly been stripped away are those relating to magic – the choosing, learning, and preparing of spells, to be more precise. In the case of the Juggernaut, it’s the limits of the Barbarians’ Rage ability, which is presented in an always-on condition. It’s not entirely clear what the simplification is for the Rogue class, but it seems likely that their class abilities are not as constrained.

Game balance suggests that these simplified classes should be weaker than their full-on versions, but that isn’t made clear.

New Classes

There are four new races in the Player’s Guide, described as being “hard to master” with “multiple customization options”.

The implication is that these are challenging for players, with options that can be hard to pick between.

This is an important factor; quite often, as characters advance in levels in 3.x, there was a convergence of capabilities that made all really high-level clerics look alike, for example. I once described this as “hewing toward an archetype,” and that description remains as good as any other.

I once thought that the best solution was for each prestige class to forbid certain other paths while completing one would open certain other doors – but never had the time to actually map out the necessary pathways, let alone to implement them within a campaign.

That might still be the best answer; but it appears that it’s no longer the only one – if the Tanares design team have done as good a job as it’s claimed they have. The promise is “classes and races that are truly unique, with fun, interesting, original features like nothing you’ve ever seen, while NOT being overpowered in comparison with what is already out there”. That’s a big promise to live up to, but if they have pulled it off, analysis of the new classes could signpost an alternative to that rather constraining technique.

The Dragonblade

This class uses combos (of what?), tactics, and power from a dragon spirit. It requires ‘constant good positioning’ and ‘well-chosen abilities’ to ‘unleash incredible powers and combos’ (there’s that word again!).

In fencing, a ‘combo’ is sometimes used to describe a deliberate string of maneuvers that are designed to expose the enemy to a more significant strike; most of these aren’t designed to actually damage the opponent, just to reposition his blade and any shield so that they aren’t where they need to be in order to stop the real attack.

That’s a level of realism that is always glossed over in D&D and related games, where the principle is that each attack roll represents just such a string of maneuvers without trying to distinguish one from another. If, in this class, the designers have found a way to restore some of that color, that makes it extremely interesting to all GMs and game designers.

The Madwalker

The blurb offered for this class reads, “Madwalkers tread the thin line that separates the realms of dreams and nightmares, the physical plane from the supernatural planes, risking their sanity and bodies in exchange for extraordinary powers” – Great Shades Of Cthulhu! Powers from Aberrations What next?

Both the illustrated representatives of this class have glowing eyes, suggesting that this class is a specific for the Kemet race. But the description provided barely even hints in that direction. It might well be that this is something that anyone can learn from the Kemet, providing the conceptual link that seems necessary.

The Elementalist

Philosophers who derive power from choices, elements, and manipulation of spells, this class offers more than 100 new spells. The class is able to manipulate the range, shape, power, and elemental foundations of these spells.

It isn’t clear from the description whether or not each class member must specialize in a single element or if they are all open for use at the same time. The only hint is that the artwork for the Elementalist that is using water has an embossing of some sort on several pieces of his armor that definitely looks representative of Water, which is hardly conclusive.

This class (quite naturally) reminds one of the mythos of The Last Airbender. How closely the resemblance runs would be a point of interest I can see it being useful, either way.

The Redeemer

This class explores the contradictory nature of the basic cleric in a more explicit way than anything I’ve seen before. They “hurt and heal,” “curse and bless,” “sacrifice and redeem”. A “plethora of off-combat tricks and powers, alongside a flexible variety of combat abilities” – but they don’t cast spells.

They purportedly gain their powers from contrasts, people, and the energy present in valuables. So that makes them a little more rogue-like in a number of respects.

For some reason, it also makes me think of the basic structure of a battery, in which two different materials (usually two metals, like Zinc and Copper) yield electricity when combined in the right medium and the right way. Which might be completely irrelevant, or it might be directly relevant to the inspiration behind this class.

Sub-classes

New sub-classes for each of the classes within the game are promised, both new and pre-existing. Rather than go into details (there are so many of them), I thought I’d simply list the ones that have been revealed to date (some more intriguing than others):

• Cleric – Chaos Domain
• Monk – Way of the Kinetic Fist
• Wizard – School of Lost Magic
• Dragonblade of Kelorth, the White Dragon
• Madwalker – Trail of the Augury
• Redeemer – Shepherd
• Barbarian – Path of the Savage Hunter
• Bard – College of Life
• Rogue – Trapmaster
• Fighter – Death Knight
• Druid – Circle of Bloom
• Monk – Way of the Animals
• Rogue – Ninja

When you examine the illustrations that accompany these in the Kickstarter, you’ll find that some of them are doing double-duty, also representing the new classes described earlier. It’s perhaps more surprising that this isn’t the case more often!

The Figurines & Minis

Hoo-boy, are there a lot of these (and that’s not even counting the ones unlocked as Stretch Goals)!

You might recognize the figure above – it’s a slightly larger representation of the Pegasus that I used to illustrate the ‘sneak preview’ last time. I wasn’t going to present it here again (though I had allowed for the possibility) until I realized how much more detail you could see in the feathers of the wings in this slightly larger size.

Some of the sculpture is absolutely exquisite, there’s no other word for it. Rather than go into absolutely everything, I thought that I’d instead restrict myself to just three facets of this substantial part of the offering.

Dragons? You Want Dragons?

Dragons are the most iconic creatures in D&D. Hands down, no question. The Dragons Collection depicts the “Avatar Dragons” of Tanares, supposedly the most powerful examples of their respective types in existence.

There is Kelorth, the White Dragon;
Zarumag, the Black Dragon; Azymor, the Red Dragon; Thyra, the Blue Dragon; and Vradok, the Undead Dragon.

The “Arena” box adds a lovely Green Dragon to the collection.

And there’s a standalone Gold Dragon.

And the “Penumbral Pack” adds the Penumbral Dragon. Which brings me to…

Creatures Of The Penumbral Plane

In the “Penumbral Pack”, you will also get “Pain”, “Anger”, “Greed” and “Envy”, all villains from the Tanares Adventures. The pack also comes with storage space for the 4 species miniatures that come in the Characters Pack (described earlier). In particular, I like the fact that the wings of the Cirrus are detachable for the lower character levels.

Another nice touch that may escape a casual review is that the miniatures are 3D representations of the character art – which therefore serves as a painting guide. The Elementalist figure is the same person, in the same pose (complete with the lightning display) as that used below).

I really wanted to feature the Penumbral Dragon figure because it looks so impressive on the Kickstarter page, but shrinking it to fit Campaign Mastery’s page limits cost it the all-important menace, blurring too many of the details. The only solution was to shrink it still further, and put the whole figure side-by-side with a cropped excerpt. It’s still not as impressive as the figure shown in the Kickstarter, though.

I also want to highlight some other especially attractive figures (in terms of use outside Tanares), all from the Madness Box: The Knight Of The Undead, Chimera, Lich, Imperial Demon, and Titan figures are all excellent.

Even if you already have figures for some of these, the ability to field a second one of visibly distinct nature, can only be useful!



Click on any of the images from this review to go to the Kickstarter campaign page.

You want them Painted?

Some people are great at painting their own figures.

For the rest of us, we either buy pre-painted or go monochrome – or persuade others to do the painting for us.

The miniatures packs in Tanares come in two varieties: unpainted and painted. And that means that its’ worth showcasing just what that means.

If you look back to just after my introduction, you can see a monochrome version of the Gold Dragon (which also gives an indication of its height).

Immediaetly above this text is a closeup of the painted Dragon for comparison purposes!

Except that there is no comparison. Plonk the monochrome version down in front of your PCs and they’ll go “Okay, that’s big”. Place the painted version down instead and the reaction would be “Okay, that’s impressive.”

The Adventures

I know, it seems like I’ve already covered this. Well, I haven’t. Not completely, anyway. That’s because there have been a number of additional adventures and adventure paths unlocked as stretch goals.

Some of these are intended for GM-less play (but should be adaptable for GM-driven play!). Others are add-ons to the adventure book that expand it further, while still others are standalone smaller adventures or adventure materials.

Additional locations and adventure hooks for different provinces, for example. Additional monsters for the campaign sourcebook. A PDF Adventure, “The Hunt for Azymore”. A new campaign arc for Epic Level missions in the Time Twist campaign arc.

I just wanted to call out that there WERE these additions!

The Funding Success Story

Why? Because that brings me to the Funding Success Story.

I’ve already pointed out that it took just 2 1/2 hours for Tanares to achieve its (rather modest) initial target. As you would expect, given that, it’s gone on to smash target after target. I’ll get to the Stretch Goals that go with that success in a moment; first, let’s just appreciate the total.

Unfortunately, in a bid to be helpful to me as a customer, Kickstarter have converted the currency to AUD. So I can say that the campaign has raised between US$1,689,000 (because that unlocked the 2nd last stretch goal) and US$1,699,000 (which will unlock the last stretch goal). That against an initial target of just US$50k.

It’s worth noting that the materials have (mostly) already been written, designed or sculpted (as appropriate) – the money is for production costs.

The Stretch Goals Achieved (So Far)

By my count, there have been no less than 82 stretch goals unlocked on the way to the current total. There have been extra minis (lots of them!) and extra creatures and magic items and adventures and sub-classes and expansions.

Far too many of them for me to list individually, to be honest (though that was what I originally intended to do – I ran out of time)!

A Limited Opportunity

This review has just scratched the surface. But one thing that I have to point out is that a number of the items up for grabs are designated Kickstarter Exclusives.

Back the project now, in other words, or miss out.

It’s not just that anything beyond the Kickstarter won’t be offered at the same discounted price; that’s a fairly widely accepted and expected business model these days.

But here’s the kicker: as I write this you have just THREE DAYS to pledge. And that will drop to two any time now.

Tiers Of Interest

The next point to be noted is that There is no “I want it all” pledge level. You can come close, but you will need to bolster even the top-level pledge with add-ons to get there.

The minimum-level entry is to get a $5 credit toward add-ons for US$5.

You can get one of the three sourcebooks in digital format for US$25. Or a Hardcover copy of the book plus the digital copy for $50. But you may want to add the Battlemats.

But the minimum basic pledge that I think will interest readers is the $69 All Digital Books and Files (which includes some that I haven’t mentioned). But you may still want the battle-mats.

The $129 Essential RPG Kit gets you all three hardcovers, plus a slipcase, DM’s Screen, and the main poster map. It also includes the Classes Miniatures Pack. All the other miniatures have to be added on, plus the arena pack, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

The $179 Minis & Cards gets you most of the Minis and Boardgame expansions, but none of the Campaign Sourcebooks, which have to be added on – and you won’t get the Extra books that I mentioned earlier. And you need to add the Madness Box, Dragon Collection, Tanares Adventures (solo play), Battlemats, Deluxe Slipcase, Mystical Pack and Gold Dragon. And any Hardcover books. And upgrade everything if you want the minis to be painted.

The RPG Superkit costs US$249 is the top of the tree from an RPG point of view. That gets you all the books in Digital format, the Essential Kit pledge listed above, and the Minis and Cards pledge listed above – that comes close to being “I want everything”. You still have to add the Madness Box, Arena, Dragon Collection, Solo Adventures, Deluxe Slipcase, Dungeon Battlemats, Mystical Pack, and Gold Dragon.

If you start with the Superkit, and make the additions mentioned above, it will cost about US$710. And that’s without the upgrades to get the minis painted, another US$186.

That’s a LOT of money. But you get a LOT for your money.

If you can afford it, buy it all. Most won’t be able to do so.

To help with your planning, assuming you have to compromise, list exactly what you can afford to do without and what minis are absolutely essential. Armed with that information, find a section of the Kickstarter labeled “Pledge Breakdown” (it’s about 1/4 of the way down). Select the Pledge tier that you want – I recommend either the Essential Kit or the Superkit just to get those extra books – then start adding on the extras you have to have.

My bare-bones “not-quite-everything collection” would be the Essential Kit + Villain Pack + Penumbral Pack + Madness Box + Dragon Collection + Maps + Gold Dragon – which totals US$413. That slices almost half the cost out of the bundle but keeps the stuff that I really want – though I would dearly love to add the extra for painting the minis. That would cost me an additional US$186, undoing two thirds of what I saved by being frugal.

Tanares is one of those rare cases where no matter how much you can (realistically) invest, you will be rewarded for it.

But don’t tale my word for it – listen to the 8,266 people who have pledged AU$2,330,559 (and counting – but only for Three More Days)!

This is a post in three almost completely unrelated segments. I start with some sad news, follow that with our regularly-scheduled article, and conclude with a sneak preview of next week’s article, for reasons that will become obvious.
 

In Memorium I have to open today’s post with some sad news: Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick has passed away, quite unexpectedly. I got the news through KODT and immediately went to his Twitter account to verify it, finding that his last post was the day before his passing. Brian first came onto my radar in 2010 with a review of Johnn’s book “Filling The Empty Chair”, which was previewed here at Campaign Mastery. From 2011 to 2012, Campaign Mastery was regularly featured amongst many others as part of his “Game Knight Reviews” of RPG Blog content, and in the years that followed he occasionally dipped his toe back into those waters. He very generously wrote a review of our game supplement “Assassin’s Amulet” that was so substantial that he had to split it into two parts. He participated in the RPG Blog Carnival regularly through to 2014. It was around then that he started / revived Moebius Adventures – I remember offering advice and doing some image editing work on his logo. I reviewed a number of his products here at Campaign Mastery and amazingly, saw actual changes to the products as a result. Throughout this, Brian was warm and supportive, a friend to the entire RPG community. He will be sorely missed. My deepest condolences to his friends and family. We are all diminished by his loss.

Reputation Fragility

I was deleting a number of pieces of spam from Campaign Mastery’s inbox the other day (as I have to do a couple of times a day) when one caught my eye.

I’d seen this offer before, many times – promises to raise the profile of the website by direct marketing it to other sites, bringing thousands of new visitors to my site for a low, low fee.

Have no fear, I wasn’t even tempted. It seemed all too likely that they would “promote” the site by spamming thousands of other sites with links back to mine, an act that would not be conducive to repeat visitors – and charge me for the ‘privilege’.

I would rather 10 real readers who care about what I have to offer them than 1000 visitors who would vanish, never to return, within seconds of arrival. The latter might be good for the visitor numbers, but the reputation campaign mastery would get from any such promotional campaign would be counterproductive in the long run.

I think the same thing every time such spam offers intrude upon my awareness – which is to say, several times a week, most weeks.

But, on this particular occasion, the thought went further, wandering off to the question of character reputations and how to handle them. This is one area where almost every rules system is noticeably silent, and there’s good reason for that: it’s notoriously difficult and subjective, and that’s not exactly conducive to good rules.

I’m not going to pretend to solve all the problems in this post, I’ll leave that to someone far cleverer than I. But I’ll try to make the problems clear, and offer the vague and partial solutions that I use when issues of reputation arise in my campaigns.

Multiple Reputations

If the adventuring party has been around for a while, they will have a reputation of some sort. If they’ve been around for a while, they might even be famous.

That reputation is actually a lot more complex than people usually realize when they think about it. Every different group will have a different connection with it, depending on their own proclivities and interests.

A fighter might know that the group has never been defeated. A merchant, that they are known to drive a hard bargain but can be suckers for a sob-story, well-told. A nobleman might know that they have supported the commons in struggles with abusive members of the Nobility, a gambler that they are willing to take chances. An Orc might know that one member of the group has a predilection for killing others of his kind, while a priest might know that the group as a whole has a particular dislike of Undead.

As this example shows, a ‘reputation’ is actually a compound of many smaller reputations – and that’s assuming that the recognition is correct in the first place (you can have loads of fun with a group of NPCs who misidentify the PCs and assign them a reputation that’s not rightfully theirs, treats the PCs like visiting kings, and then dumps a really hard problem in their laps).

Combat Correlation

Some elements of a reputation can be interpreted as correlating with the combat capabilities, usual tactics, and overall style of the group with the reputation. Some of these may make the group sound so impressive that they gain a psychological advantage over the opposition. At other times, it may cause the opposition to attempt to avoid combat altogether, or to alter their own usual tactics. It can even be that a particular reputation can give the group a net combat disadvantage that their enemies can attempt to take advantage of.

Combat is usually a part of any game system for which players demand hard-and-fast rules, and such situations are so complex in their permutations that they don’t lend themselves to hard-and-fast rules. The best solution is often some sort of guideline and some limits.

For example, “a strong reputation may be worth no more than (d20-based system) ±4 (3d6-based system) ±2 or (d% system) ±20%. This bonus may be applied before any attempt to hit is made (a normal combat bonus) or may be added to the damage done in the event of a successful hit in exchange for an equal amount of damage being received by the attacking force”.

There are lots of permutations, and they can all be valid. They can all also complicate combat rules massively.

Non-Combat Correlation

Outside of combat, reputations can enable encounters to anticipate and even manipulate attitudes, behaviors, and opinions; can create expectations; can influence reactions, bend people either toward or against alliances, can manifestly alter the reception that characters receive, and so on.

These can materially impact character interactions to the point of conferring bonuses or penalties to the use of some skills (oratory and interpersonal skills, for example). Reactions and responses are likely to be as individual as the characters encountered.

The one thing that you can be sure of is that the reactions and any bonuses to either side that result will be different in nature and independent in valuation to those that are relevant to combat.

One size will not fit all, in other words.

Incrementation

One approach that some game systems have employed is to make reputation a trackable stat. Do things that negatively impact on your reputation and it goes down. Trade on your reputation and it goes down. Do things that positively impact on your reputation and it goes up.

This is remarkably similar to the approach I attempted to take with Piety – see The Woes Of Magic & Piety. In a nutshell, so many actions and events impact these stats that the paperwork becomes a real drag on a campaign. No matter how much you might want to abstract and streamline the process, it only takes one exception for the mechanics to become overwhelming and the rules, untenable.

Known Reputation

Recognition of a reputation is another complex issue. For a reputation to have any impact at all, it has to first be known to the potential target of the reputation, and correctly assigned to this particular group of characters.

Look back at the list of reputational aspects listed earlier – does anyone really think that they will all have the same penetration? On top of that, there is the question of how well-informed a specific individual or group might be. Both factors have to be taken into account to determine if a reputation is even known.

What is to be avoided is having an array of reputations, each with their own penetration, each with their own chance of being known, that have to be checked or even compiled with each encounter. This would be an efficiency nightmare – but anything more efficient seriously compromises the fidelity of the resulting mechanics.

Triggered Consequence

Let’s simplify for a moment, and take a ‘monochromatic’ reputation – the PCs have a reputation for being extremely effective in combat. Such a simple reputation, uncolored by anything else, makes it easier to explore the next range of problems.

Assume, furthermore, that this reputation is known to an encounter, and correctly assigned to the characters in question. This will clearly trigger some sort of consequence – but the nature of that consequence is quite varied. Some encounters will attempt to attack by surprise, others may attempt to avoid conflict, and still others will view this as an opportunity to grow their own reputations. Some may quake with fear, others attack with desperation.

Once again, there is no one-size-fits-all answer, and that complicates any game mechanics, because you need some mechanism for selecting the most appropriate consequence, and translating that into game mechanics.

Reputations Swing Both Ways

The GM always has to bear in mind that NPCs may have a reputation that is known to the PCs, too, and this can either compound with, or can oppose, the effects of a PCs reputation.

Things can grow even more complicated when the NPC has a reputation that they have to live up to and the PCs do not, because this steps into the area of taking agency away from the players with regards to their characters.

The best approach is to inform the players of the reputation and deliberately get them to consider that reputation from the point of view of their characters – with the GM able to then function as an editor should that response be inadequate to the reputations scale, scope, and specifics, and translate that into game mechanics as necessary.

Using Reputation: A roleplaying decision

The concept of “Reputation” poses so many problems that it’s easy to see why game designers prefer to ignore it. But it’s so rational and reasonable that GMs often feel they don’t have that option, or deliberately choose to do so for playability reasons, no matter how unrealistic that choice might be.

With that foundation, it’s time to look at my hopelessly inadequate and totally vague and incomplete solutions to the problem.

It starts with this: A reputation can do nothing more than guide NPC choices, actions, and plans unless the owner of the reputation seeks to actively exploit their reputation through roleplaying. The manner of any impact on NPC choices, actions, and plans is a matter of roleplaying the NPCs in question and stems from the GM’s perceptions of the totality of the game world including the past actions of the owners of the reputation. Attempts to utilize a reputation that is not known by the target produces a response that is generally the opposite of that desired.

Let’s unpack that a little.

• The impact that a reputation has on prep and planning by an NPC is a roleplaying question for the GM.
• Whether or not the NPCs have even heard of the PCs is also a roleplaying decision for the GM.
• To get any game mechanical impact from a reputation, the character(s) with the reputation have to actively attempt to trigger their reputation through roleplay and in-character dialogue. Simply saying “have they ever heard of me” won’t cut it.

That sidesteps a number of the difficult questions and potential game mechanics. It means that the PCs have to actively attempt to leverage their reputation before it has any impact.

The Consequence

If reputation triggers a change of some sort, that consequence is also principally handled as a roleplaying question. It might cause the target to attack more violently, or be more defensive, or seek to pull back from a confrontation; or any of half-a-dozen other choices; which ones apply are dependent on the nature of the reputation and how the individual reacts to such situations. There are too many possibilities for hard-and-fast rules.

This means that I am not directly interpreting the reputation into game mechanics; instead, I am interpreting their reaction into game mechanics if necessary.

That might seem a very subtle difference, but it trades a blanket rule that has to be ‘one size fits all’ with something more specific.

I feel the need for a non-combat example at this point: Character#1 (C1) has a reputation for rewarding artists whose work they like. Character #2 (C2) is an artist in an art class that C1 is inspecting. C2 knows C1’s reputation, and decides to make an extra effort, to be more attentive to detail than usual. The GM assesses quality of success in a creative art by “Margin of success” because that yields a simple number that he can then apply to other related die rolls such as an inclination to purchase. The GM doesn’t try and interpret the impact of C1’s reputation directly; he determines how C2 will react to that reputation (assuming he knows it) and then only has to worry about translating that response. How much of a difference does taking more care and attention to detail make to the quality of C2’s creative efforts? Taking more care is a common act, one that will confront the GM regularly. That makes it far easier to come up with an answer. Since C2’s art is usually very slapdash (a character trait that the GM decides is appropriate given C2’s personality), he decides that the extra effort makes a big difference, and gives C2 a +3 on his painting roll instead of the usual -2 that he would apply to a ‘slapdash’ artwork. As a result, C2 succeeds in his roll by 2 instead of failing by 3. C1 stops and encourages C2 in a complimentary manner but (quick roll of the dice) does not offer to buy. How C2 reacts to this is the next question – he might be discouraged by the lack of a sale, or he might make a personal breakthrough as a result of the positive feedback.

The process works the same way in Combat, or in any other situation. If, in D&D, you are confronted with a creature known to be able to breathe fire, you’re going to be on the lookout for any hint that this is about to happen – does that give a bonus to your saving throw? Or does NOT knowing that reputation mean that you have a penalty? (I would personally think the latter, but a passionate player might be able to convince me to go the other way – but he would have to bear in mind that the same standards would then be enforced for all characters at all times).

Do You Know Who I Am?

Quite often, a reputation isn’t deployed for any specific purpose. “Do You Know Who You’re Dealing With?” could be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate, or to use a reputation for fair dealing to grease the wheels in a negotiation, or as a warning to play fair “or else”. It’s this very variety that makes blanket rules for reputation so difficult, and why determining the impact something that is better done through roleplaying.

To a large extent, the intentions of the character deploying his reputation are irrelevant. That’s why I rule that the reputation has to be ‘channeled’ through roleplay if the character has some specific intent in mind – in which case, any reputation is a secondary influence on what happens, the roleplay ‘vehicle’ is the primary driver of the reaction. If you are trying to intimidate, a threatening posture and some forceful dialogue are the primary triggers of a reaction, and the reputation, if it’s known, is an add-on that might amplify, or diminish, the reaction.

A character with a reputation for being friendly and caring will have a harder time intimidating someone than a character with a reputation for being rough and violent – but not as hard a time as a character with a reputation for being meek and mild. Clark Kent intimidates no-one, and everyone should stand up to him.

Do You Know Who I Am?

Dueling reputations can be fun to roleplay, and in many ways, this is a natural come-back. But this nettle has a sting that can no longer be avoided.

It’s all well and good for the GM to decide whether or not an NPC has heard of a PC through sheer roleplaying and character knowledge – but that won’t generally work when the shoe is on the other foot, and the player asks the GM, “Do I know him?”

You need some basis on which to answer, and most world-knowledge is simply too vague to give the definitive answer that the player is looking for. “Well, he’s the CEO of a successful corporation in Brunei of medium size that is well-known in some circles, with a reputation for smothering rivals financially even if it results in short-term losses; he always has an eye on the long-term, and that sometimes makes his business moves surprising to others.” — that doesn’t answer the question, it evades it, while leaving the window open for the player to tell the GM what the GM already knows – that the PC has no connections to Brunei and it’s business culture, and may or may not be part of the ‘some circles’.

In D&D it’s fairly easy – roll a d20 and if it’s less than or equal to the NPC’s level, then the answer is ‘yes’ to at least some extent; then the GM just has to work out (as above) what the PC knows or has heard.

In any other game system, I simply come up with some equivalent. In the Hero System, I would look at a simple fraction (1/2 or 1/3) of the character points (XP) earned – and if the character has bought a ‘famous’ disadvantage (or some other equivalent), double it to get a target to roll against. If the NPC has an ‘anonymous’ disadvantage, I would halve it. The result is a target number that can be rolled against quickly and simply.

This quick-and-dirty approach solves a lot of the problems that otherwise clog up resolving the question, equating overall character success with recognizability.

Undeserved Reputations

For all practical purposes, there is no difference between a deserved reputation and one that has been conferred by a headline-hungry media. But an undeserved reputation can be very useful to the GM.

Consider the following sequence:

The PC has just spotted someone running from a grocery store from which a siren is blaring. Apprehending the person, they discover that the sales clerk is dead, but there is no sign of the gun used to kill him, and a search of the person apprehended yields nothing incriminating. The Police arrive and take the runner into custody, run his name through their database, and find that he was found guilty of murder ten years earlier and released a couple of months ago on a technicality. So far as they are concerned, he’s probably as guilty as sin, and this time they’ll nail him for it.

So the runner’s reputation has just scored a bullseye so far as the police are concerned – he’s now guilty until proven innocent, and the PC can put the whole thing behind him if he wants to without a second thought.

But the GM wants to engage the PC as a gateway to the plotline.

So: The runner says “I ran because I knew how it looked, but I didn’t do it – he was dead when he arrived. I knew I’d get no fair deal from the cops, but with your rep, [PC], I hoped for better from you. Guess I should’a known better.”

This uses the PCs hard-won reputation for fairness and championing justice against them, lumping them in with the most prejudiced parts of the criminal justice system. Whether they like it or not, they have to become an advocate for the Runner, protecting him from being stitched up for a crime there is no proof that he committed.

So the PC engages with the investigation, in the course of which they discover that the ‘technicalities’ that released the runner from jail added up to a wrongful incarceration – the release on a technicality was simply the most expedient way to get him out of the system. What was originally a duty (ensuring a fair investigation) is now likely to turn the PC into a passionate advocate for the runner; the reputation with which he was saddled has been expunged in the PCs mind.

But all the other evidence keeps stacking up against the Runner. He claims that the police or someone else are stitching him up, they are so convinced that he’s guilty, or maybe it’s the real guilty party trying to deflect attention to him. If so, they are doing a very good job.

Engaging plotline sinks its’ hooks into Player, news at eleven!

The GM lets the investigation unfold for a while, but in an improbably short time, or maybe in a flash-forward, its’ time for the Runner to face trial. That signals to the player (if they know their stuff) that the GM has presented everything that the PC needs to do in order to overturn the verdict, or that the GM is playing a bigger and longer game.

The PC is called as a witness by the prosecution and questioned as to the events of the night (it is so that these will be fresh in the players’ mind that the GM has brought the trial forward). The prosecution shuts down any attempt to testify beyond the scope of the facts, doing their best to treat the PC as a hostile witness. The Prosecution is even able to sneak the admission out of the PC that the accused killer has a prior criminal record. They become more convinced than ever that the Runner is headed for another wrongful conviction, and that the GM has some 11th hour plot twist laid out for the trial which lets the PC discover the real killer and save the day.

The PC then gets called as a witness by the Defense and asked the more open questions that the prosecution wouldn’t let them answer, while the player is desperately looking for the hole that the GM must have planted in the case for them to find, without success.

Despite a glowing character testimonial by the PC, which largely counters the defendants’ past record, the Jury finds enough circumstantial evidence to convict the Runner. As he is being led from the court, the PC tells him something like “Don’t give up”. The Runner shrugs, and replies “I had to try. I hoped having you on my side would be enough to get me off. Didn’t work, huh? But at least you tried. Thanks,”

He then turns to the DA. “Is it too late to do a deal on sentencing? I’ll tell you where I hid the gun and where I got it from. You’ll want that.” The DA replies, “We’ll talk about it.”

Moral of the story: sometimes an undeserved reputation cloaks innocence – and sometimes the perception that a reputation is undeserved cloaks guilt – and in this case, the Runner was using the PC’s reputation for their own ends.

Submerged Reputations

Some people submerge a reputation that they deserve. The ruthless businessman who secretly donates to charitable causes because he uses that reputation for ruthlessness to increase the money available for such gifts, for example.

Characters with richly complex reputations – such traits can only remain submerged for so long – make for interesting characters for PCs to interact with. You can even re-read the example above from the perspective that the Runner was attempting to submerge his true criminal behavior and the reputation that goes with it.

The common trope, in fact, is that of the generous and kind-hearted businessman who is really ruthless, corrupt, and even criminal – but keeps that part of their activities a secret.

A reputation for fun

Reputations can be a lot of fun to play with. The players in my superhero campaign will never forget the dumpy, middle-aged woman who showed up at Boston Police Central wearing a polka-dotted shower curtain as a cape (and nothing else) claiming to be a member of their team. The poor, delusional, woman thought that if she was a member of the team, she would finally stop being disrespected.

And the players in Fumanor will never forget the people who were impersonating them to gain access to Noble Houses and their valuables, who made the mistake of asking the real members of the group to join them – the NPCs had heard the PCs reputations but did not recognize the owners.

Or Edmond Confessor (not his real surname), who confessed to everything – again, and again, and again – but who was actually a witness with vital information that he used to make himself look more guilty because he deserved to be punished.

Reputations are fun to play with – but you need to know how they are going to work, first.

If this doesn’t whet your appetite, nothing will! The Pegasus from Tanares, one of many figurines and minis that come with the Campaign Setting. Background by Mike. Sneak Preview Next time on Campaign Mastery, I will be reviewing Tanares, a game setting and much much more. I don’t want to get ahead of myself (mainly because I don’t have the time) but needed to give advance notice. There is currently a little more than a week left in the Kickstarter campaign, and when the review comes out, there will only be a day or two remaining. There are lots of add-ons – beautifully-carved miniatures – that will add substantially to the cost of backing the project and getting out of it all that you can. Some are even available painted for those with no skill in that area (like me). So much so that I expected people having trouble raising enough money on short notice to fully participate, and being quite unhappy about the prospect – when they saw what was up for grabs. So this preview is to advise readers to set funds aside. US$200-300 should set you up fairly nicely. Yes, you can get by for less – but the extras that are exclusive to the Kickstarter make this a case of any investment being very well rewarded. So I’m giving readers advance notice – next week, I will be reviewing something that looks worth an investment of that scale. You won’t have very long to respond when I do – so start putting what funds you can spare together in advance! If you can’t wait, click on the Pegasus to be carried on it’s wings to the Kickstarter!

995… 996…

I’m still looking for ideas on how to commemorate my 1000th post at Campaign Mastery. Time is getting really really short, now!